d leg muscles until they were
pretty well limbered up. The thing that pleased me was the way I felt
towards my new work that second morning. I'd been a bit afraid of a
reaction--of waking up with all the romance gone. That, I knew, would
be deadly. Once let me dwell on the naked material facts of my
condition and I'd be lost. That's true of course in any occupation.
The man who works without an inspiration of some sort is not only
discontented but a poor workman. I remember distinctly that when I
opened my eyes and realized my surroundings and traced back the
incidents of yesterday to the ditch, I was concerned principally with
the problem of a stone in our path upon which we had been working. I
wanted to get back to it. We had worked upon it for an hour without
fully uncovering it and I was as eager as the foreman to learn whether
it was a ledge rock or just a fragment. This interest was not
associated with the elevated road for whom the work was being done,
nor the contractor who had undertaken the job, nor the foreman who was
supervising it. It was a question which concerned only me and Mother
Earth who seemed to be doing her best to balk us at every turn. I
forgot the sticky, wet clay in which I had floundered for nine hours,
forgot the noisome stench which at times we were forced to breathe,
forgot my lame hands and back. I recalled only the problem itself and
the skill with which the man they called Anton' handled his crow bar.
He was a master of it. In removing the smaller slabs which lay around
the big one he astonished me with his knowledge of how to place the
bar. He'd come to my side where I was prying with all my strength and
with a wave of his hand for me to stand back, would adjust two or
three smaller rocks as a fulcrum and then, with the gentlest of
movements, work the half-ton weight inch by inch to where he wanted
it. He could swing the rock to the right or left, raise or lower it,
at will, and always he made the weight of the rock, against which I
had striven so vainly, do the work. That was something worth learning.
I wanted to get back and study him. I wanted to get back and finish
uncovering that rock. I wanted to get back and bring the job as a
whole to a finish so as to have a new one to tackle. Even at the end
of that first day I felt I had learned enough to make myself a man of
greater power than I was the day before. And always in the background
was the unknown goal to which this toil was to le