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They realized that nothing really serious had been done, or the boys would have been sent to the prison asteroid, where all true criminals were sent. So a true spirit of comradeship developed between the cadets and the enlisted men. When Captain Strong arrived to speak to Roger and Astro, he found them in the tunnel, working as a team of a shoveler and a sweeper.
On the other hand, so completely are the rule-of-thumb ideas still dominant that the writer has never met a single shovel contractor to whom it had ever even occurred that there was such a thing as the science of shoveling. This science is so elementary as to be almost self-evident. For a first-class shoveler there is a given shovel load at which he will do his biggest day's work.
"I only get thirty-five dollars a month," whispered the clerk. "Only thirty-five bones a month? Well, by gum!" The tramp looked the shrinking clerk over with unspeakable contempt. "Why, there ain't a Dago shoveler in the outfit doesn't get more than that! "Very well, then," he conceded loftily. "You can keep your coppers. I never let it be said I rob the poor.
And it was found on studying the rule-of-thumb plan at the Bethlehem Steel Company, where each shoveler owned his own shovel, that he would frequently go from shoveling ore, with a load of about 30 pounds per shovel, to handling rice coal, with a load on the same shovel of less than 4 pounds.
At the works of the Bethlehem Steel Company, for example, as a result of this law, instead of allowing each shoveler to select and own his own shovel, it became necessary to provide some 8 to 10 different kinds of shovels, etc., each one appropriate to handling a given type of material not only so as to enable the men to handle an average load of 21 pounds, but also to adapt the shovel to several other requirements which become perfectly evident when this work is studied as a science.
The Pittsburgh managers knew just how the results had been attained at Bethlehem, but they were unwilling to go to the small trouble and expense required to plan ahead and assign a separate car to each shoveler, and then keep an individual record of each man's work, and pay him just what he had earned. Bricklaying is one of the oldest of our trades.
"Miss Wharton is no more fitted for the position of dean at Overton College than I am for the presidency of the United States. She may have been successful in some little, out-of-the-way academy in a jerkwater town, but she's sadly out of place here. She has about as much tact as a rhinoceros, and possesses the æsthetic perceptions of a coal shoveler.
"The horses need a rest anyway." "Going to clean up soon?" Mr. Conroyal called to the men. "In about ten minutes," answered the shoveler. "And, I reckon, we can show some gold when we do. Won't you wait and see how it pans out?" he invited cordially. "Oh, do, please!" cried both the boys. "All right," assented Mr. Conroyal.
One curious thing he had noticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts; which was the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to come a "slunk" calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is not fit for food.
Stay, that is the shoveler that fat, brownish black rascal, with the greenish neck and that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whistling duck was a crested one, sir, and you will understand that I deliberated no longer. We only lack the variegated black-capped duck now.
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