"'A husky young fellow with the right stuff in him,'" echoed Walter. The familiar words had come home to roost.
"He will start you in at seventy-five per month"--this was from Harrison--"and you will have to earn it. Base-ball cuts no figure with the major in business hours."
"Your conscience can rest easy on that score," added Naughton. "No danger of your cheating Uncle Sam."
"An honest pull is the noblest work of man," declaimed Harrison, and this seemed to sum up the whole matter.
When Walter returned to his quarters, his first impulse was to write a letter home. This proved more difficult than might seem. To report to his anxious parents and his adoring sister that he was employed on board a dynamite ship would not tend to ease their minds. He could imagine this bit of news landing in the cottage at Wolverton with the effect of a full-sized explosion. Eleanor would probably take her pen in hand to compose a metrical companion piece of "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck."
"I must be tactful," frowningly reflected Walter. "I don't want to make them nervous. Perhaps I had better not go into details. I will simply say that I have a fairly lucrative position. Twenty cents an hour isn't much down here, but it sounds big alongside that four-dollar-a-week job in the hardware store."
Then he discovered that to discuss the better position which he had not yet secured was to raise hopes that sounded fantastic. Those rival ball-players from Culebra might knock him out of the box in the first inning. This would mean good-by to Major Glendinning's favor. Base-ball cranks were fickle and uncertain persons. Walter therefore merely informed the family that the climate agreed with him and he was sure his judgment had been sound in coming to the Isthmus.
"Between unloading dynamite and worrying about this base-ball proposition," he soliloquized, "not to mention the fact that General Quesada is camping on my trail, I expect to be gray-headed in about one more week."
The dynamite ship had been almost emptied of cargo, when Naughton suggested:
"I won't need you on this job after to-day, Goodwin. Why not go to Culebra with me to-morrow morning and see some of the canal work? I shall have to inspect the dynamite stored in the magazines."