The seven o’clock whistle blew sharply. “Lope her, boys!” sang out the section foreman. All talking stopped abruptly, and the click of picks, swung with steady blows, and the rasp of shovels echoed all along the grade. Loring, new to “mucking,” swung his pick with all the strength of his back, bringing it down, with rigid full arm strokes, upon the rocky soil. The foreman noticed this with amusement. “He’ll bust in an hour,” he thought; but he only said: “Loosen your grip a bit or you’ll get stone-bruises.” Then he passed on up the line, to tell a Mexican, who had already stopped to light a cigarette, that “this ain’t no rest cure.”
Hop Wah from the depths of the cook tent perceived Loring’s energetic labors, and called out to him: “Hey, me bludder, no swing like that! No damnee use. Just let him pick fall!” Stephen nodded gratefully, and complied with the practical advice. He worked steadily, only pausing to exchange his pick for a shovel, whenever he had broken enough earth, or loosened some large stone. “Surely,” he thought, “I can keep this up for ten hours. Here, at last, is a job that I can do.”
Stephen Loring had never in his life “made good.” He had started well on many ventures, and then given out. His friends had at first been intensely admiring, and had predicted great things for him; but gradually they had given him up as hopeless. They would have lent him money cheerfully; but a determination not to borrow was one of his few virtues. In consequence, having fallen stage by stage, he was now reduced to being a day laborer, a “mucker,” watched by a foreman to see that he did not shirk. If the same method had been applied to him earlier, it might have been his salvation. As it was, he had sunk beneath the current.
The next hour seemed to Loring twice as long as the first. His wrist pulsed with agony from the jar of the blows. He was compelled to wrap his handkerchief around his right hand, as he had worn great blisters sliding it up and down the pick handle. The sweat, as it rolled down from his forehead, made his cheeks smart. Every few minutes he was forced to rest. At ten o’clock the time-keeper came to him, and, drawing a shabby brown book from his pocket, entered Stephen’s name on the rolls. Then he drew from his pocket and handed to Loring a brass tag, like a baggage check. “Your number is four fifty-three; keep this now!”
Stephen looked at the tag for a second, then slipped it into his pocket. It did not jangle against anything. He leaned on his pick handle for a moment, and with mild interest listened to the time-keeper, as he accosted the Mexican who was working next to him.
“Eh, hombre! What’s your name? Cómo se llama?”
The foreman spoke sharply to Stephen, and with the blood rising slightly to his temples at the rebuke, he fell to work again.
Loring possessed a strong imagination and he had solaced many a hardship by either planning for pleasanter occupations in the future, or vividly reconstructing worse ones in the past. But imagination is a dangerous plaything. The men working on either side of him thought of nothing, except perhaps some solution of the great problem of the human race, how to make the greatest possible show of work with the least effort. Stephen, however, was accompanied in his work by imagination. To-day it was of a sort which was neither subtle nor pleasant. It began by saying to him: “You are healthy. You will probably live for thirty years or more. They will be pleasant years, won’t they? There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so if you work ten hours a day for thirty years, perhaps you may grow used to work. Work is a great companion, is it not, Stephen? It is unfortunate,” finished imagination glibly, “that you must do this forever.”
Loring spoke aloud in answer to his imagination, timing his syllables to the already shortened strokes of his pick. “Not forever?”
“Well,” rejoined imagination, “I see no alternative, do you? And what is more,” added the Devil who at this moment was operating imagination, “You are not even building the railroad. All you are doing is moving rocks. Any one can move rocks.”