Page:Ralph Paine--The Steam-Shovel Man.djvu/154

 of Culebra. The walls were covered with maps and blue prints. At a desk heaped with papers sat the soldierly, white-haired ruler of forty thousand men, the supreme director of a four-hundred-million-dollar undertaking. His cheek was ruddy, his smile boyish, and he appeared to be at peace with all the world.

He had come to listen to complaints, no matter how trivial, to pass judgment, to give advice, like a modern Caliph of Bagdad. It was a cog in the machinery of his wonderful organization. Dissatisfaction had been checked as soon as the colonel set apart the one forenoon of the week in which his men were not at work in order that they might "talk it over with him." As Jack Devlin entered the office he was humming under his breath the refrain of a popular song composed by an Isthmian bard: