“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “It’s true I didn’t touch him but ghosts don’t eat mince pie.”
The change from the shadows of the Blue Moon and the weird whispers of Panther Eye to the low roar of Dave’s boiler room and Dave’s own low rumbling voice was almost startling. Dave was real, and quite human, the heating plant, made up as it was of bricks and pipes, pumps and boilers, was about the most substantial thing in the world. No spooks here.
In this place for six hours every day Dave reigned as king. He had come to love that room as some people love their homes. The mild, clean air, made pure by the constant breathing in of those twin boilers, brought unconscious joy to his heart. The low hiss of steam, the faint roar of the fires on the grates, the quish-quash of the pumps, were music to his ears.
To his nicely tuned ears, every sound had a meaning. If the hiss of steam increased, if a pump bumped ever so softly, if the fire’s low roar sank to a whisper, he was on his feet. His hands grasped a shovel, a valve, or a wrench and in a trice all was right again.
More than this, the old heating plant stood for a very definite change in his life. The moment he stepped through those doors and good old John MacQueen said, “Your work will be this. You will do it this way and that way,” he had become important both to himself and to others. He was a worker.
He loved to sit there, with the green shaded light gleaming low, with the shadows leaping among the pumps and the pipes, and picture the rooms in those other buildings. In the gym, all aglow with light, a practice game of basketball was in progress. Soon the players would go bounding down the stairs to the showers. In the old brown stone building across the way, Prexy, in his office, dictated letters, in another room the treasurer thumbed his ledgers. Far up beneath the rafters were bat-roosts where a score or more of boys bent over tables reading intently, or figuring feverishly. In the red brick “dorm,” at the far corner of the campus, more than a hundred girls garbed in lounging pajamas, kimonos, or more formal garb, were studying.
“All these,” he would think with a smile, and a glad tug at his heart, “are warm and comfortable on a damp and chilly night, because I am here watching these old furnaces and listening to that hiss of steam. I am part of a big thing. I am a worker.”