We had been but a few minutes at work when the cadets went marching past, on their way to mess. Familiar as most of the men were with the sight, they seized eagerly upon the diversion that it offered. The boss relaxed his vigilance. The work visibly slackened, as we lent ourselves to the fascination of individual motion merged into perfect harmony of collective movement. Conspicuous in the rear was the awkward squad, very hot in its effort to walk erect, and keep its shoulders back and its little fingers on the seams of its trousers. The men laughed merrily at the comical contrast between such grotesquely strenuous efforts at conformity and the ease and strength and grace of the unison which preceded it.
No rain came to give us breathing-space in the afternoon. Hour by hour the relentless work went on. The sun had soon absorbed the last drop of the morning rain, and now the ruins lay burning hot under our feet. The air quivered in the heat reflected from the stone and plaster about us; the fine lime-dust choked our breathing as we shovelled the refuse into the carts. You could hear the muttered oaths of the men, as they swore softly in many tongues at the boss, and cursed him for a brute. But ceaselessly the work went on. We worked as though possessed by a curious numbness that kept us half-unconscious of the straining effort, which had become mechanical, until we were brought to by some spasm of strained muscles.
But five o'clock came at last, and with it, on the second, the loud "Time's up!" of the head boss. You could see men fairly check a tool in its downward stroke, in their eagerness not to exceed the time by an instant. In two minutes the tools were housed and the works deserted, and the men were running like school-boys, with a clatter of dinner-pails, in a competitive scramble for seats in the dump-carts, which were moving toward Highland Falls.
The hindmost were left to walk the mile to their lodgings. I fell in with two old Irishmen, who noticed me with a friendly look, and then went on with their conversation, paying me no further heed. But I felt strangely at home with these old men. Their short, faltering steps exactly suited my own, and I comfortably bent my back to the angle of their stoop, not in an effort to simulate their figures, but because to stand erect cost me exquisite agony.
The men in the carts were soon out of our sight, but the remnant was large and was thoroughly representative. We formed a weird procession, this fragment of a company in the ranks of labor. There were few native-born Americans, one or two perhaps, besides myself; but there were Irish and Scandinavians and Hungarians and Italians and negroes.
A WEIRD PROCESSION, THIS FRAGMENT OF A COMPANY IN THE RANKS OF LABOR