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Then, one day, she come to me. 'Charley, she says, 'how do you like to work for me? You drive dogs, make camp, travel with me. I say that I make too much money carrying letters. She says, 'Charley, I will pay you more money. I tell her that pick-and-shovel man get fifteen dollars a day in the mines.
Even did he do pick-and-shovel work, for the municipality, for three days, when he had to give way, according to the impartial procedure, to another needy one whom three days' work would keep afloat a little longer. Daughtry would have put Kwaque to work, except that Kwaque was impossible. The black, who had only seen Sydney from steamers' decks, had never been in a city in his life.
He had first suggested it, he had surveyed it, and plotted it, and measured and planned and worked it out on paper; and now, when it came to the actual pick-and-shovel work, he supervised and directed and watched each hour of work, and each yard of progress. It was tricky work, too, and troublesome.
Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness.
I gave the agent his fee of two dollars, and let him put a name not my own or any part of my own, you may be sure on his list for the evening shipment. It appeared to cut no figure with this employment shark that I bore none of the marks of a successful pick-and-shovel man.
Give me a chance, sir; I'm an American; I'm sick o' bein' hunted from jail to jail, like a wild animal, just 'cause I can't be satisfied with pick-and-shovel work. I've spent half o' the last five years in jail as a vagrant. I put in a month at Fernandina, and then I was chased out o' town. They gave me two months at Cedar Keys, and I came here, only to get a month more in this jail.
Whisper that there's a gold strike at the North Pole, and that same inevitable white-skinned creature will set out at once, armed with pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest patent rocker and what's more, he'll get there. Tip it off to him that there's diamonds on the red-hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will storm the ramparts and set old Satan himself to pick-and-shovel work.
I can't get there in time if I wait for the morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do you hear from Professor Anners?" "Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load." "And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.
It was an ignoble lair, a little room with tables and wooden benches, a zinc counter, cheap bar fixtures, and blue-stained wooden pitchers; in the ceiling a U-shaped gas bracket. Two pick-and-shovel labourers were playing cards. They turned around and laughed. The proprietor took the excessively short-stemmed pipe from his mouth and spat into the sawdust.
Whatever his failings, and he groaned under his fair human share of them, Stuart Ford had the gift of leadership. Before he had been a month on the branch as its "old man" and autocrat, he had won the good-will and loyalty of the rank and file, from the office men in the headquarters to the pick-and-shovel contingent on the sections.
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