“‘What in the hell for?’
“‘I don’t know. I just telling you what Tom-Tom told me. He say Mr. Snopes say the shut-off float in the water tank ain’t heavy enough. Say that tank start leaking some day, and so he going to fasten them three safety valves on the float and make it heavier.’
“‘You mean—’ I says. That’s as far as I could get: ‘You mean—’
“‘That what Tom-Tom say. I don’t know nothing about it.’
“But they were gone. Up to that night, me and Turl had been catching forty winks or so now and then when we got caught up and things was quiet. But you can bet we never slept none that night. Me and him spent that whole night, time about, on that coal pile, where we could watch them three gauges. And from midnight on, after the load went off, we never had enough steam in all three of them boilers put together to run a peanut parcher.
And even when I was in bed, at home, I couldn’t sleep. Time I shut my eyes I would begin to see a steam gauge about the size of a washtub, with a red needle big as a shovel moving up toward a hundred pounds, and I would wake myself up hollering and sweating.”
But even that wore away after a while, and then Turl and Harker were catching their forty winks or so again. Perhaps they decided that Snopes had stolen his three eggs and was done. Perhaps they decided that he had frightened himself with the ease with which he had got the eggs. Because it was five months before the next act took place.
Then one afternoon, with his fires cleaned and steam up again, Tom-Tom, smoking his pipe on the coal pile, saw Snopes enter, carrying in his hand an object which Tom-Tom said later he thought was a mule shoe.
He watched Snopes retire into a dim corner behind the boilers, where there had accumulated a miscellaneous pile of metal junk, all covered with dirt: fittings, valves, rods and bolts and such, and, kneeling there, begin to sort the pieces, touching them one by one with the mule shoe and from time to time removing one piece and tossing it behind him, into the runway.
Tom-Tom watched him try with the magnet every loose piece of metal in the boiler-room, sorting out the iron from the brass: then Snopes ordered Tom-Tom to gather up the segregated pieces of brass and bring them in to his office.
Tom-Tom gathered the pieces into a box. Snopes was waiting in the office. He glanced once into the box, then he spat. “How do you and Turl get along?” he said. Turl, I had better repeat, was the night fireman; a Negro too, though he was saddle-colored where Tom-Tom was black, and in place of Tom-Tom’s two hundred pounds Turl, even with his laden shovel, would hardly have tipped a hundred and fifty.
“I tends to my business,” Tom-Tom said. “What Turl does wid hisn ain’t no trouble of mine.”
“That ain’t what Turl thinks,” Snopes said, chewing, watching Tom-Tom, who looked at Snopes as steadily in turn; looked down at him. “Turl wants me to give him your day shift. He says he’s tired firing at night.”
“Let him fire here long as I is, and he can have it,” Tom-Tom said.
“Turl don’t want to wait that long,” Snopes said, chewing, watching Tom-Tom’s face. Then he told Tom-Tom how Turl was planning to steal some iron from the plant and lay it at Tom-Tom’s door and so get Tom-Tom fired. And Tom-Tom stood there, huge, hulking, with his hard round little head.
“That’s what he’s up to,” Snopes said. “So I want you to take this stuff out to your house and hide it where Turl can’t find it. And as soon as I get enough evidence on Turl, I’m going to fire him.”
Tom-Tom waited until Snopes had finished, blinking his eyes slowly. Then he said immediately: “I knows a better way than that.”
“What way?” Snopes said. Tom-Tom didn’t answer. He stood, big, humorless, a little surly; quiet; more than a little implacable though heatless. “No, no,” Snopes said. “That won’t do. You have any trouble with Turl, and I’ll fire you both. You do like I say, unless you are tired of your job and want Turl to have it. Are you tired of it?”
“Ain’t no man complained about my pressure yet,” Tom-Tom said sullenly.
“Then you do like I say. You take that stuff out home with you tonight. Don’t let nobody see you; not even your wife. And if you don’t want to do it, just say so. I reckon I can get somebody that will do it.”
And that’s what Tom-Tom did. And he kept his own counsel too, even when afterward, as discarded fittings and such accumulated again, he would watch Snopes test them one by one with the magnet and sort him out another batch to take out home and hide.
Because he had been firing those boilers for forty years, ever since he was a man. At that time there was but one boiler, and he had got twelve dollars a month for firing it, but now there were three, and he got sixty dollars a month; and now he was sixty, and he owned his little cabin and a little piece of corn, and a mule and a wagon in which he rode into town to church twice each Sunday, with his new young wife beside him and a gold watch and chain.
And Harker didn’t know then, either, even though he would watch the junked metal accumulate in the corner and then disappear over night until it came to be his nightly joke to enter with his busy, bustling air and say to Turl: “Well, Turl, I notice that little engine is still running.
There’s a right smart of brass in them bushings and wrist pins, but I reckon it’s moving too fast to hold that magnet against it.” Then more soberly; quite soberly, in fact, without humor or irony at all, since there was some of Suratt in Harker too: “That durn fellow! I reckon he’d sell the boilers too, if he knowed of any way you and Tom-Tom could keep steam up without them.”
And Turl didn’t answer. Because by that time Turl had his own private temptations and worries, the same as Tom-Tom, of which Harker was also unaware.
In the meantime, the first of the year came and the city was audited.
“They come down here,” Harker said, “two of them, in glasses. They went over the books and they poked around everywhere, counting everything in sight and writing it down. Then they went back to the office and they was still there at six o’clock when I come on. It seems that there was something wrong; it seems like there was some old brass parts wrote down in the books, only the brass seemed to be missing or something.
It was on the books all right, and the new valves and things it had been replaced with was there. But be durn if they could find a one of them old pieces except one busted bib that had got mislaid under the work-bench someway or other. It was right strange.
So I went back with them and held the light while they looked again in all the corners, getting a right smart of soot and grease on them, but that brass just naturally seemed to be plumb missing. So they went away.
“And the next morning early they come back. They had the city clerk with them this time and they beat Mr. Snopes down here and so they had to wait till he come in in his check cap and his chew, chewing and looking at them while they told him.
They was right sorry; they hemmed and hawed a right smart, being sorry. But it wasn’t nothing else they could do except to come back on him, long as he was the superintendent; and did he want me and Turl and Tom-Tom arrested right now, or would tomorrow do? And him standing there, chewing, with them eyes like two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough, and them still telling him how sorry they was.
“‘How much does it come to?’ he says.
“‘Three hundred and four dollars and fifty-two cents, Mr. Snopes.’
“‘Is that the full amount?’
“‘We checked our figures twice, Mr. Snopes.’
“‘All right,’ he says. And he reaches down and hauls out the money and pays them the three hundred and four dollars and fifty-two cents in cash, and asks for a receipt.”
III
Then the next Summer came, with Harker still laughing at and enjoying what he saw, and seeing so little, thinking how they were all fooling one another while he looked on, when it was him who was being fooled. For in that Summer the thing ripened, came to a head. Or maybe Snopes just decided to cut his first hay crop; clean the meadow for reseeding. Because he could never have believed that on the day when he sent for Turl, he had set the capital on his monument and had started to tear the scaffolding down.
It was in the evening; he returned to the plant after supper and sent for Turl; again two of them, white man and Negro, faced one another in the office.
“What’s this about you and Tom-Tom?” Snopes said.
“‘Bout me and which?” Turl said. “If Tom-Tom depending on me for his trouble, he sho’ done quit being a fireman and turned waiter. It take two folks to have trouble, and Tom-Tom ain’t
