But, as I say, at the time he seemed positively appalling to me, a virulent specimen, and I thought, “The Irish brute!  To think of human beings having to work for a brute like that!  To think of his driving men like that!” However, I soon began to discover that he was not so bad as he seemed, and then I began to like him.

The thing that brought about this swift change of feeling in me was the attitude of his men toward him.  Although he was so insistent with his commands, they did not seem to mind nor to strain themselves working.  They were not killing themselves, by any means.  He would stand over them, crying, “Up with it!  Up with it!  Up with it!  Up with it!” or “Down with it!  Down with it!  Down with it!” until you would have imagined their nerves would be worn to a frazzle.  As it was, however, they did not seem to care any more than you would for the ticking of a clock; rather, they appeared to take it as a matter of course, something that had to be, and that one was prepared for.  Their steps were in the main as leisurely as those of idlers on Fifth Avenue or Broadway.  They carried boards or stone as one would objects of great value.  One could not help smiling at the incongruity of it; it was farcical.  Finally gathering the full import of it all, I ventured to laugh, and he turned on me with a sharp and yet not unkindly retort.

“Ha! ha! ha!” he mocked.  “If ye had to work as hard as these min, ye wouldn’t laugh.”

I wanted to say, “Hard work, indeed!” but instead I replied, “Is that so?  Well, I don’t see that they’re killing themselves, or you either.  You’re not as fierce as you sound.”

Then I explained that I was not laughing at them but at him, and he took it all in good part.  Since I was only a nominal laborer here, not a real one—­permitted to work for my health, for twelve cents an hour—­we fell to conversing upon railroad matters, and in this way our period of friendship began.

As I learned that morning, Rourke was the foreman-mason for minor tasks for all that part of the railroad that lay between New York and fifty miles out, on three divisions.  He had a dozen or so men under him and was in possession of one car, which was shunted back and forth between the places in which he happened to be working.  He was a builder of concrete platforms, culverts, coal-bins, sidewalks, bridge and building piers, and, in fact, anything that could be made out of crushed stone and cement, or bricks and stone, and he was sent here and there, as necessity required.  As he explained to me at the time, he sometimes rose as early as four a.m. in order to get to his place of labor by seven.  The great railroad company for which he toiled was no gentle master, and did not look upon his ease, or that of his men, as important.  At the same time, as he himself confessed, he did not mind hard work—­liked it, in short.  He had been working now for the company for all of twenty-two years, “rain or shine.”  Darkness or storm made no difference to him.  “Shewer, I have to be there,” he observed once with his quizzical, elusive Irish grin.  “They’re not payin’ me wages fer lyin’ in bed.  If ye was to get up that way yerself every day fer a year, me b’y,” he added, eyeing my spare and none too well articulated frame, “it’d make a man av ye.”