Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/169

Rh He refilled his pipe. "We went to work again. We got a lot of steel piling that would hold out quicksand, and we sank a fence of interlocking steel piles, in a square, inside the wooden cofferdam and bolted to it. Then, inside this square steel dam, we sank another dam of the same sort of steel piles, fitting them, knuckle to hub, in a circle around the broken caisson. And by pumping out the water and digging out the sand inside the square dam, and sinking the circular one as we dug, we succeeded at last in driving the circular dam down to rock bottom. Understand? But the top of that circular dam was nineteen feet below the top of the square steel dam, and the pumps had to be worked night and day. I took the night shift, with Larsen under me.

We had to dig out the broken caisson.

"It was as ticklish a job as you 'll meet with in the ordinary run of work. It was one of those bits that make an engineer's life so—so interesting to him. It would n't interest you any more than a doctor's account of a surgical operation.

"However, we got it done—or almost. And one morning, after the day shift had taken over the work, I congratulated Larsen on it. I said that Nolan ought to give him a raise of wages. Of course, I was trying to find out how he felt about the wages.

He was sitting at my bedroom window, waiting for the tug to start back to the city. He slept at home. I