Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/106

96 “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of calling up spirits by daylight,” said Oki, still scratching away at his flea-bitten hands and legs and back.

“Hardly!”

“By the look of things now, unless we get a ghost to appear, we haven’t much chance of winning.”

“Who’s that?” Machida, who had come from Tokyo to help them, turned suddenly round. “Who’s talking about spooks?”

Oki drew in his neck comically.

“Hell, were you listening in? I wouldn’t have said it if I’d known.” He grinned at Handa.

The company, hoping to crush the union, had planned and constructed Factory No. 11 on a grand scale. Even if all its other factories were to be razed to the ground, they need not turn a hair so long as No. 11 was immune. All the workers employed were steady farmers’ sons who had been testified by their headmaster as “free from dangerous thoughts.”

While the foundation stone of the factory was being laid, a Korean named Chiun had been buried alive there. He was a young fellow, with the unmistakable eyebrows and nose of a Korean, but he spoke Japanese without an accent. Now he was petrified in the concrete. He had slipped and fallen into the sticky mass flowing down the chute; as he sank he trod with his feet and waved his arms in the air as if swimming, but his limbs only sank deeper and deeper in the concrete, which was as treacherous as a bog. The contractor had been a party to graft as regards the proportion