Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

46 страница из 56

"You just go ahead with these valves," he instructed as he moved away out of the light we shared. "I'll be back around twelve o'clock," he said, and vanished.

I was scared on his account.

I had begun to feel a warm affection for him. Although he was inclined to be almost surly when others tried to learn out of his vast experience, with me he was quite different; he wanted me to share his understanding. Knowing him was almost like getting away from Ellis, because he knew so much of other roads and of strange locomotive species we had never overhauled. He was the first really to teach me how to handle steel; he had been better educated than the Ellis men in the shop, and was so sure of himself when engaged with mathematics as to make me marvel.

"Listen," he had cautioned me, "when you start a valve job always take your own port marks! No matter if someone says he has taken them already; you take your own port marks and you won't go wrong."

You can bet I did not want to see the last of such a friend. I did not want to see him fired. So that night when he went on a spree, I struggled with that mechanical enigma to save his job.