Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/163

Rh without gloves. He confessed that he was a civil engineer. And to make a point in his discussion he asked permission to tell a story—a long one—about a "hired man."

The drummer said: "Go ahead."

The business man glanced at his watch instinctively.

The lawyer lit a cigar, with an air of exceeding his prescribed allowance, and nodded like a judge.

The engineer relit his pipe. "I had a man named Larsen working under me once," he said. "He was foreman of one of the shifts of laborers—and a laborer himself.

"We were building an intake tunnel for the waterworks of a town on Lake Erie.

"I don't want to be more explicit than that. For one thing, there 's a suit about it, between the contractors and the city, still on in the courts." He nodded to the lawyer over his pipe.

"I had to sink a shaft just inside the island that protected the harbor from the lake. Then, from the foot of that shaft, I was to tunnel in one direction out under the island to the lake, and in the opposite direction back under the harbor to the city, so as to connect the lake with the pumping-station on the mainland. They had been using, before this, a big steel intake pipe laid along the bottom of the harbor, but it kept leaking at the joints, taking in sewage from the bay, and keeping the people boiling their drinking-water.