Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/166

154 months. We 'd been two months building our first cofferdam, and another month strengthening it with our second. It had taken us three weeks to get the caisson placed, and we'd been five weeks sinking it. We 'd driven our first piles through floe ice—dancing on the decks of our tugs to keep our feet warm—and now it was August. We 'd worked in sleet, in driving rain, in the drizzle of spring and the heat of mid-summer. We 'd fought the northeast storms that battered the walls of our dam and the quicksand that shifted and undermined them. One of my men had fallen into the shaft and broken his neck. Another had had his foot crushed under a steel plate. One of the boilers in the power-house had blown out. My pumps had clogged with sand. My steam-pipes had burst. My firemen had come to work drunk. Our materials had been delayed. Even my little bedroom, in the shack that served as an office, on an angle of the cofferdam, had taken fire, and my oilskins and such had been burned.

"And Larsen had been sharing all these anxieties—disappointments—delays—with a sympathy that you couldn't help smiling at. Whenever he sat with me, of an evening, in my bedroom over the office, he 'd take his chair to the window and keep one eye on the work outside. He arrived in the morning in the bows of the company's tug, and he left, at night, on the stern. He seemed to be living with his back to the outer world and his face to the shaft.

"I said to the company's superintendent, one day: