"I don't know whether I do or not."
"Well," the foreman said, "you ought to know about them. Those two men have just begun to shingle the piazza roof. If you can wait a few minutes, I'll take you up there. You aren't very busy this morning, are you?"
David smiled and shook his head.
The foreman smiled too.
"You wait right here, and I'll come and get you pretty soon."
So David waited, and while he was waiting he watched the men putting on clapboards.
They had begun at the top and had got about halfway down that side.
The side of the house was all covered with red stuff which looked something like cloth and something like thick paper. It was paper, and it rippled and waved in the wind.
The men were putting the clapboards on outside of that red paper.
A man had a pile of clapboards beside him, and he took one up and he lifted the edge of the one above, and he tucked the thin edge of the clapboard that he held in his hand under the edge that he had lifted; and he gave it little taps with his hammer until it was in the right place, and then he drove fine nails through the thick edge that he had lifted, and through the thin edge of the clapboard beneath, and into the wall of the house.