Chains : $b lesser novels and storiesDreiser, Theodore
General
Chains : $b lesser novels and stories
Dreiser, Theodore
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
“I’ll shoot down the first damned man that tries to shut the door
before me and Kelly are in,” the big foreman was calling, the while
he was pulling this same Kelly from the mud and slime outside. Then
fairly throwing him into the lock, and leaping after him, he turned and
quietly helped closed the door.
McGlathery was amazed at this show of courage. To stop and help another
man like that in the face of so much danger! Cavanaugh was even a
better and kinder man than he had thought—really a great man—no coward
like himself. But why had Cavanaugh persuaded him to come down here
when he knew that he was afraid of water! And now this had happened.
Inside as they cowered—all but Cavanaugh—they could hear the sound
of crushing timber and grinding brick outside, which made it quite
plain that where a few moments before had been beams and steel and a
prospective passageway for men, was now darkness and water and the
might of the river, as it had been since the beginning.
McGlathery, seeing this, awoke to the conviction that in the first
place he was a great coward, and in the second that the tunnel digging
was no job for him. He was by no means fitted for it, he told himself.
“’Tis the last,” he commented, as he climbed safely out with the others
after a distressing wait of ten minutes at the inward lock. “Begob,
I thought we was all lost. ’Twas a close shave. But I’ll go no more
below. I’ve had enough.” He was thinking of a small bank account—six
hundred dollars in all—which he had saved, and of a girl in Brooklyn
who was about to marry him. “No more!”
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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