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The navvy seems to work slowly; but he knows well, because his task is a day-long one, that his forces must be economised, that over-exertion must be avoided.
"It's his back," said Emett, and true to his ruling passion, forever to minister to the needs of horses, men, and things, he began to rub the Indian and call for the liniment. Jim went to fetch it, while I, still believing the Navvy to be dangerously hurt, knelt by him and pulled up his shirt, exposing the hollow of his brown back. "Here we are," said Jim, returning on the run with the bottle.
He was a savage-looking, hairy man, with a brick-coloured face and over-hanging eyebrows. "Won't he give us nothing to remembrance him by?" "Give you something!" Farintosh said with a sneer. "Why, man, he says you are too well paid already." "Does he, though?" cried the navvy, flushing even redder than nature had made him. "Is that the way he speaks after we makes him? It ain't on the square.
William Van Horne had announced that 'the last spike would be just as good an iron spike as any on the road, and had it not been that Donald A. Smith happened along in time to drive the spike home, it would have been hammered in by the navvy on the job. Six months later the first passenger train went through from Montreal to Vancouver.
The falling snow had thinned out and looked like flying powder; the leaden clouds, rolling close to the tree-tops, grew brighter and brighter; bits of azure sky shone through rifts. Navvy had tramped off to find the horses, and not long after his departure he sent out a prolonged yell that echoed through the forest. "Something's up," said Emett instantly.
Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back," awakens in them a worshipful admiration, even as it did in the effete Cleon.
Down yonder, towards the place they call Little January, y'know, there's a steep hill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and a watchman's box where all the cyclists that want to smash their faces, and a few days ago now a navvy comes and sticks himself in there and no one never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gone dead.
And it seemed no wonder to me that the Navvy should hang back from this sacrilegious treatment of his god. A natural wisdom, which I had in common with all human beings who consider self preservation the first law of life, deterred me from acquainting my august companions with my belief. At least I did not want to break up the camp.
He had seen the trout. The man who was fishing with paste had stood so still and patient that the trout, re-assured, had come out, and the navvy trust a navvy to see anything of the kind caught sight of him. The navvy knew how to see through water. He told the fisherman, and there was a stir of excitement, a changing of hooks and bait.
The only hope of higher wages that was held out to him was from the gradual rise of everything, or the forced rise consequent upon agitation. But, said he, the navvy must follow his work from place to place, and lodgings are dear in the towns, and the farmers in country places will not let their cottages except to their own labourers how was the navvy even with higher wages to keep a wife?
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