The Days Work, vol 1 | Page 2

"I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Isn't it damned good?"
"I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said to himself.
"You're too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wart;
assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if any
credit comes to me out of the business!"
Indeed; the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and
his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his
rawness to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by
the half-hundred - fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the
railway workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste
subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen - but
none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the
underlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times in

sudden crises - by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of
cranes, and the wrath of the river - but no stress had brought to light
any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have
honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked themselves.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of
office-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the
last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the
impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at
least half an acre of calculations - and Hitchcock, new to
disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the
futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one,
only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that
followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that
followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to
another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor
little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own
tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till
Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table, and - he
feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was
the cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works;
and after the cholera smote the Smallpox. The fever they had always
with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class
with whipping powers, for the better government of the community,
and Findlayson watched him wield his powers temperately, learning
what to overlook and what to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and
it covered storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape,
violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that
knows it should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance;
birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring castes;
argument, expostulation, persuasion, and the blank despair that a man
goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case.
Behind everything rose the black frame of the Kashi Bridge - plate by
plate, girder by girder, span by span-and each pier of it recalled
Hitchcock, the all-round man, who had stood by his chief without
failing from the very first to this last.

So the bridge was two men's work - unless one counted Peroo, as Peroo
certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar, a Kharva from Bulsar,
familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, who had
risen to the rank of sarang on the British India boats, but wearying of
routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up the service and gone
inland, where men of his calibre were sure of employment. For his
knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavy weights, Peroo was
worth almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services;
but custom decreed the wage of the overhead men, and Peroo was not
within many silver pieces of his proper value. Neither running water
nor extreme heights made him afraid; and, as an ex-serang, he knew
how to hold authority. No piece of iron was so big or so badly placed
that Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it - a loose-ended, sagging
arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount of talking, but perfectly
equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had saved the girder of
Number Seven pier from destruction when the new wire rope jammed
in the eye of the crane, and the