Page:Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 CAN.djvu/42

 "If you like 'em," I murmured.

It wasn't very many weeks after that that Ed came into our little place in Northville and announced suddenly we were going to move up toward the valley.

"Huh?" was all I got out.

He told me he had a cottage that he'd found for rent not far from the construction site.

"But most of the rest of the crowd lives around here," I protested, thinking that my afternoons of gossip with the construction wives would be hard to come by if I was set down up in some shack in the woods.

But there's Ed for you. He had an idea in that thick skull and he was off after it. I said, "Why?" He said nothing. I said, "Why?" After twice that was enough. Ed had his reasons.

The cottage was all one floor, a big living-dining room, bedroom, porch, and a little garage sticking out like something they'd pasted on as an afterthought. It was lonely and the nearest neighbors' house was God knows how far away and I wasn't so keen about that. The ground was low here making the atmosphere dampish and the earth rich and soft. We were only a mile or so from the construction site and the convenience of its nearness was, I thought, the main reason for our moving.

But instead of being pleased by the change, Ed seemed to grow more uncommunicative and moody. His dissatisfaction centred around someone who'd come in to run the steam shovel.

"Guy named Ronsford. Got some high and mighty college education so they put him operating Big Mike instead of giving me the job."

I could see the current state of affairs and this man Ronsford were eating away at my husband.

Time passed and the path of construction widened and headed toward us so that during the day when I sat on the porch reading or listening to the radio, I could hear the sounds from the crew and I came to know the noise Big Mike made. There was nothing else up there, tractors or trucks, that had the heavy, deep-throated rumbling and vibrating of the huge steam shovel. On Sundays we often drove past the excavations.

"He keeps Big Mike all polished up," Ed growled, and even I could notice how shiny the steamshovel was, its cab where the operator sat on the left side resplendent under a new coat of red paint

Ed Mumbled a lot under his breath those days and what I could mainly make out was the word "Ronsford." He hated the shovel's operator, swore there was an unholy allegiance between the man and machine.

It was along about the first week in June that Ronsford disappeared. There was a lot of noise and investigation but no clews. Nobody'd known too much about him beforehand except that he had a mechanical engineering degree and some good references. The construction boss just figured he'd skipped out all of a sudden. There was no evidence of foul play, and it wasn't too much later that Ed came home and told me of a conversation he had with the boss.

His big, broad face lit up, "So he says to me, Vilma, he says, 'Meglund, you been watchin' that steam shovel and fussin' around with it for quite a while now. Think you can take on the job?'"

Ed clapped his hands together almost like a kid. "Whaddya think of that, Vilma?"