called[25] out to him: “Hey, me bludder, no swing like that! No damnee use. Just let him pick fall!” Stephen nodded gratefully, and complied with the practical advice. He worked steadily, only pausing to exchange his pick for a shovel, whenever he had broken enough earth, or loosened some large stone. “Surely,” he thought, “I can keep this up for ten hours. Here, at last, is a job that I can do.”

[25]

Stephen Loring had never in his life “made good.” He had started well on many ventures, and then given out. His friends had at first been intensely admiring, and had predicted great things for him; but gradually they had given him up as hopeless. They would have lent him money cheerfully; but a determination not to borrow was one of his few virtues. In consequence, having fallen stage by stage, he was now reduced to being a day laborer, a “mucker,” watched by a foreman to see that he did not shirk. If the same method had been applied to him earlier, it might have been his salvation. As it was, he had sunk beneath the current.

The next hour seemed to Loring twice as long as the first. His wrist pulsed with agony[26] from the jar of the blows. He was compelled to wrap his handkerchief around his right hand, as he had worn great blisters sliding it up and down the pick handle. The sweat, as it rolled down from his forehead, made his cheeks smart. Every few minutes he was forced to rest. At ten o’clock the time-keeper came to him, and, drawing a shabby brown book from his pocket, entered Stephen’s name on the rolls. Then he drew from his pocket and handed to Loring a brass tag, like a baggage check. “Your number is four fifty-three; keep this now!”

[26]

Stephen looked at the tag for a second, then slipped it into his pocket. It did not jangle against anything. He leaned on his pick handle for a moment, and with mild interest listened to the time-keeper, as he accosted the Mexican who was working next to him.

“Eh, hombre! What’s your name? Cómo se llama?”

The foreman spoke sharply to Stephen, and with the blood rising slightly to his temples at the rebuke, he fell to work again.

Loring possessed a strong imagination and he had solaced many a hardship by either planning[27] for pleasanter occupations in the future, or vividly reconstructing worse ones in the past. But imagination is a dangerous plaything. The men working on either side of him thought of nothing, except 

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