"I'd hate like hell to get stuck," he said.
"You won't get stuck," I answered.
"It isn't the loss I mind," he said, "but—well there is a firm or two that is waiting to give me the laugh."
"They won't laugh," I said.
He looked at me a moment and then called in a clerk.
"Have those figures put in shape," he said, "and send in this bid."
Corkery secured the contract. I picked one hundred men. The morning we began I held a sort of convention.
"Men," I said, "I've promised to do this in so many days. They say we can't do it. If we don't, here's where they laugh at the gang."
We did it. I never heard from Corkery about it but when we were through I thanked the gang and I found them more truly mine than they had ever been before.
Every Saturday night I brought home my fifteen dollars, and Ruth took out three for the rent, five for household expenses, and put seven in the ginger jar. We had one hundred and thirty dollars in the bank before the raise came, and after this it increased rapidly. There wasn't a week we didn't put aside seven dollars, and sometimes eight. The end of my first year as an emigrant found me with the following items to my credit: Ruth, the boy and myself in better health than we had ever been; Ruth's big mother-love finding outlet in the neighborhood; the boy alert and ambitious; myself with the beginning of a good technical education, to say nothing of the rudiments of a new language, with a loyal gang of one hundred men and two hundred dollars in cash.