Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/167

Rh 'Larsen watches that shaft as if he thought some one was trying to steal it.'

The superintendent had risen from the ranks of the 'sandhogs' himself, and he had the sort of practical mind that is n't interested in character study. He said: 'That 's what Larsen 's paid for!'

"I wondered whether that was the whole explanation of Larsen. It was n't easy to decide anything about him. He'd been a sailor, and he had all that patience, and resourcefulness, and sort of silent endurance—don't you know?—that the sea gets into a man. He was habitually silent.

"Well, we were still sinking the caisson with dynamite—dropping it a foot or so at a time—when old Nolan, the head of the company, came to see for himself what was delaying us. He looked over the situation, and cursed the City Engineer for reporting clay and gravel where there was quicksand, and cursed our own men for not discovering the truth when they made their borings. He cursed the slowness and difficulty of the operations, and the consequent loss of profits on the contract. And he ended by ordering us to use more dynamite in a charge.

"I objected, of course, that the dynamite might split the caisson.

"Nolan was a black little man with an under jaw that closed on a cigar in a bulldog grip. 'Dynamite,' he said, 'is one of those things that either make you or break you. Go ahead. Put down a box of it.'