But Fudge refused to cheer up and presently took his departure gloomily. It is very easy to be a pessimist when one is weary, and Fudge was very weary indeed!
CHAPTER VIII
LANNY STUDIES STEAM ENGINEERING
They were putting down a two-block stretch of new macadam on the Lafayette Street extension. A bed of cracked stone, freshly sprinkled, was receiving the weighty attention of the town’s biggest steam roller as Lanny White strolled around the corner. Chug-chug-chug! Scrunch-scrunch-scrunch! Lanny paused, hands in pockets, and looked on. Back and forth went the roller, the engineer skillfully edging it toward the center of the road at the end of each trip. Further down the street, where the workmen were tearing up the old dirt surface, a second and much smaller roller stood idle, its boiler simmering and purring. Lanny smiled.
“Me for the little one,” he muttered, as he walked toward the smaller roller. The engineer was a huge, good-natured looking Irishman with a bristling red mustache, so large that he quite dwarfed the machine. He had a bunch of dirty cotton waste in his hand and, apparently for the want of something better to do, was rubbing it here and there about the engine. He looked up as Lanny came to a stop alongside, met Lanny’s smile and smiled back. Then he absent-mindedly mopped his face with the bunch of waste, without, however, appreciable effect, and leaned against the roller.
“Gettin’ warm,” he volunteered.
Lanny nodded, casting his eyes interestedly over the engine.
“I should think that would be a pretty warm job in hot weather,” he observed conversationally.
“’Tis so. Put eighty or ninety pounds o’ shtame in her an’ she throws out the hate somethin’ fierce.”
“She’s smaller than the other one, isn’t she?”