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Updated: June 27, 2025
A few minutes later a dozen active boys left the castle, and scattered to various points on the hills around, so as to command a view over a considerable extent of country. Soon after, some thirty carts went down the road accompanied by a number of men with shovels, and twenty of the garrison commanded by one of the old soldiers.
We took off our hats at poor Billy's grave a minute, and then climbed over the cholla-covered hill carrying our picks and shovels, and the canvas sacks to take the treasure away in. There was no trouble in reaching the sandy flat. But when we got there we found it torn up from one end to the other. A few scattered timbers and three empty chests with the covers pried off alone remained.
Hume, venting upon a trifle the wrath that seethed within him, shouted angrily, cursing the horse that dashed by him. The horse, seeing his way through the gate shut off, turned and dashed around the house, seeking a break in the yard fence. Hume ran after him, still cursing. The two men who were working in the yard lay down their rakes and shovels and came up.
Nothing seemed easier to us; and we all went to work, some trying to knock it down with their logs, others scraping it with their shovels and tongs, never thinking that by worrying those poor shaky walls, we risked tumbling the building down on our heads. Fortunately we could not do much harm, because the noise made by the logs would have attracted some one.
They could not see as far as Duck and Mud Islands, and sat down upon the gun carriages to await the rising of the sun. A hundred stalwart Marylanders came from their houses with axes, picks and shovels, ready to resume work on the redoubt. "Lieutenant Willard." said Fernando, "your judgment is perhaps better than mine. Will you give these men direction in regard to the works?"
As they sat eating, the sun went down, and fresh logs were thrown on the fire, lighting up the open space with a warm, bright light. They had finished, and were starting their pipes, when, on the other side of the creek where the firelight streamed across the track, the figures of two men with swags on their backs and diggers' picks and shovels over their shoulders, came in sight.
Luckily, the sky was cloudless, and the stars shone with uncommon brilliancy, as though the constellations wished to afford us every facility for carrying our designs into effect. The clearing was sufficiently large to enable the light to penetrate the open space, and with no other guide, we commenced striking our shovels and picks into the earth, in hopes of reaching the right spot.
They come in the evening and bore holes for the blasting. Once these holes were bored by hand, but now they are made with powerful drills that work by compressed air. A little later other men come and set off cartridges. In the morning when the dust has settled and the smoke has blown away, the loaders appear with their shovels and load the coal into the cars.
There were sledges, bales of canvas, which on investigation proved to be tents, coils of rope, pick-axes, shovels, five portable houses in knock-down form, a couple of specially constructed whale boats, so made as to resist any ordinary pressure that might be brought to bear on them in the polar drift, and nail-kegs and tool-chests everywhere.
He had made a handsome display of hand-wrought nails, a superior line of pokers and shovels for fireplaces, together with a number of very respectable andirons. On each of these larger pieces of handiwork my patient had stamped his initials with a little steel die that was made for him. Each piece was his own, each piece was the product of his own versatility and his own strength.
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