" Luckily
Tom ran a shovel instead of a passenger train and could claw away
at his hillside as savagely as he chose without any danger
whatever, beyond that of killing himself or an odd "nigger" or
two.
We had other treasures on exhibition in 47. There was "Shorty,"
for instance. "Shorty" was a jolly, ugly open-handed, four-eyed
little snipe of a roughneck machinist who had lost "in the line of
duty" two fingers highly useful in his trade. In consequence he
was now, after the generous fashion of the I.C.C., on full pay for
a year without work, providing he did not leave the Zone. And
while "Shorty," like the great majority of us, was a very
tolerable member of society under the ordinary circumstances of
having to earn his "three squares a day," paid leisure hung most
ponderously upon him.
The amusements in Empire are few--and not especially amusing.
There is really only one unfailing one. That is slid in glass
receptacles across a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad
Avenue opposite Empire Machine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty"
was gradually winning the title of a thirty-third degree "booze-
fighter," and passengers on any afternoon train who took the
trouble to glance in at a wide-open door just Atlanticward of the
station might have beheld him with his back to the track and one
foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with the nonchalance
of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed its legitimate
mission.
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