Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/364

310 "More or less."

"Well, is that the reason you come here?"

"Yes, a friend put the advertisement in my hands this morning," answered Albert Bean uneasily.

"What can you do?"

"Nothing much. The last job I had was watching a new building."

"Well, this job isn't watching, although it might be called looking. Want to start right off?"

Albert Bean nodded his head, and Mr. Sullivan raised himself with some difficulty from his chair.

"Follow me, general," he said.

He meekly followed Mr. Sullivan into a small dark room, cluttered with hoes, rakes, shovels, axes, and other agricultural implements. Albert Bean's heart failed as he regarded these symbols of toil, but he felt rooted to the spot in morbid terror. The jest had gone far enough, he knew, but he was powerless to move.

From outside the shed came the noise of the roar and rush of the wind; the wind that had ripped the calm of his morning to a bleak and tattered afternoon. He heard the swish of the crisp leaves on the walk and the dry hiss of the dust. An orgy of dancing papers whirled in his head.

"This is one fine municipal job," Mr. Sullivan said, lifting an empty potato sack off a large pile. "There's nothing like working for the public. After forty years you'll get a pension, so in this job you don't have to worry about the future. You done wise to come here."

"I know I done wise," Albert Bean answered

An hour later, with a bulging potato sack slung to his waist, and a spiked staff like a trident clutched in his fist, Albert Bean attempted to spear a muddy piece of paper. But he was not adroit enough, for a gust of wind caught it and away it sailed, frisking across the brownish grass of Boston Common.

"I'll get that damn paper," he muttered aloud, and pressing his hat firmly onto his head, he whirled away after it, the sack bumping and flying behind him. In the twinkling of an eye he had disappeared over the crest of a little hill.