was in his living on the
spot, with his stables and teams near at hand.

Tom, he felt assured, was out of the way. Not only was the contract very
much too large for her, requiring twice as many carts as she possessed,
but now that the spring work was about to begin, and Babcock's sea-wall
work to be resumed, she had all the stevedoring she could do for her own
customers, without going outside for additional business.

Moreover, she had apparently given up the fight, for she had bid on no
work of any kind since the morning she had called upon Schwartz and told
him, in her blunt, frank way, "Give the work to McGaw at me price. It's
enough and fair."

Tom, meanwhile, made frequent visits to New York, returning late at
night. One day she brought home a circular with cuts of several improved
kinds of hoisting-engines with automatic dumping-buckets. She showed
them to Pop under the kerosene lamp at night, explaining to him their
advantages in handling small material like coal or broken stone. Once
she so far relaxed her rules in regard to Jennie's lover as to send for
Carl to come to the house after supper, questioning him closely about
the upper rigging of a new derrick she had seen. Carl's experience as
a sailor was especially valuable in matters of this kind. He could not
only splice a broken "fall," and repair the sheaves and friction-rollers
in a hoisting-block, but whenever the rigging got tangled aloft he could
spring up the derrick like a cat and unreeve the rope in an instant. She
also wrote to Babcock, asking him to stop at her house some morning
on his way to the Quarantine Landing, where he was building a
retaining-wall; and when he arrived, she took him out to the shed where
she kept her heavy derricks. That more experienced contractor at once
became deeply interested, and made a series of sketches for her, on the
back of an envelope, of an improved pintle and revolving-cap which
he claimed would greatly improve the working of her derricks. These
sketches she took to the village blacksmith next day, and by that night
had an estimate of their cost. She was also seen one morning, when the
new trolley company got rid of its old stock, at a sale of car-horses,
watching the prices closely, and examining the condition of the animals
sold. She asked the superintendent to drop her a postal when the next
sale occurred. To her neighbors, however, and even to her own men,
she said nothing. The only man in the village to