Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/170

158 had my boots off, sitting on the side of my bed, smoking. I said:

"'Nolan ought to give you a raise of wages on the strength of this.'

"Larsen replied: 'No. He won't raise no wages onto me.'

"I asked him whether he did n't think he was worth more than he got. He opened his hands and looked at the palms of them. 'It 's the brains that gets paid,' he said. 'I got a boy. He goes to school.… No. Not me.'

"I can't give you the tone, or the words exactly. But they expressed the sort of tragedy of his own labor—don't you know?—and the hope that made him ambitious for the boy. He said he was making an engineer of him.

"That was lesson number two for me. I got my next one next night."

The business man interrupted: "You would n't call him typical, would you?"

The engineer answered: "I don't know. Wait till I tell you the rest.

"I slept till ten o'clock that next morning, and then I dressed to go into the city—to arrange for a supply of stone and cement that would soon be needed—and this business kept me on my feet all day. At nightfall I boarded the company's tug again, intending to have a look at the shaft and then turn the work over to Larsen and have a sleep. When I arrived I found Larsen struggling with a clogged pump at the foot of the shaft.