Читать книгу The Steam-Shovel Man онлайн

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"Well, you see, I simply must pitch in and give my father a lift somehow."

"And you're not old enough to vote!" heartily exclaimed the other. "There's many a grown man that thinks himself lucky if he can buy his own meal-ticket, much less give his father a lift."

"I don't mean to talk big—" began Walter.

"It does you credit, my son. I like to see a lad carry a full head of steam. You look good to me. I size you up as our kind of folks. Yes, there are various jobs down there you might get away with. And the lowest wages paid an American employee is seventy-five dollars a month. But remember, it's a long, wet walk back from the Isthmus for a man that goes broke."

"Oh, I don't even know how I could get there. I am just dreaming about it," smiled Goodwin.

"If you do ever drift down that way, be sure to look me up, understand—Jack Devlin, engineer of steam-shovel 'Twenty-six' in Culebra Cut, and she broke all records for excavating last month."

He crossed the deck with a jaunty swagger, as if there was no finer thing in the world than to command a monster of a steam-shovel eating its way into the slope of Culebra Cut. Walter Goodwin concluded that he had been forgotten by the busy captain of the Saragossa, but just then the steward came with a summons to the breezy quarters abaft the wheel-house and chart-room. That august personage, Captain Martin Bradshaw, had removed his coat and collar, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles adorned his ruddy beak of a nose. Running his hands through his mop of iron-gray hair, he swung round in his chair and said, with the twist of the mouth that was like an unfinished smile: