ut it," the senior answered, "Not half a bad
job for two men, is it?" "One--and a half. 'Gad, what a Cooper's Hill
cub I was when I came on the works!" Hitchcock felt very old in the
crowded experiences of the past three years, that had taught him power
and responsibility.

"You _were_ rather a colt," said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll like
going back to office work when this job's over."

"I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Is n't it good?"

"I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said to
himself. "You're too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub
thou wast; assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou
shalt be, if any credit comes to me out of the business!"

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and
his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness
to break to his own needs. There were labour-contractors by the
half-hundred--fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the
railway workshops, with perhaps twenty white and half-caste
subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen--but
none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the
underlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times in
sudden crises--by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure
of cranes, and the wrath of the river--but no stress had brought to
light any man among them whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have
honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked themselves.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of office
work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the last
moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the
impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin
at least half an acre of calculations--and Hitchcock, new to
disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England;
the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commission if
one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that
followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end
that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leave
to another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his
poor little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as
his own ton