“You see how it is, Rourke, don’t you?” I pleaded.

He seemed to see, but he was still angry.

“An o.k. blank!  An o.k. blank!” he echoed contentiously, but in a somewhat more conciliatory spirit.  “He wants an o.k. blank, does he?  Well, I expect ye might as well give thim to him, thin.  I think the man lives on thim things, the way he’s aalways caallin’ fer thim.  Ye’d think I was a bookkeeper an’ foreman at the same time; it’s somethin’ aaful.  An o.k. blank!  An o.k. blank!” and he sputtered to silence.

A little while later he humorously explained that he had “clane forgot thim, anyhow.”

The ensuing month was a busy one for us.  We had a platform to lay at Morrisania, a chimney to build at Tarrytown, a sidewalk to lay at White Plains, and a large cistern to dig and wall in at Tuckahoe.  Besides these, there were platforms to build at Van Cortlandt and Mount Kisco, water-towers at Highbridge and Ardsley, a sidewalk and drain at Caryl, a culvert and an ash-pit at Bronx Park, and some forty concrete piers for a building at Melrose—­all of which required any amount of running and figuring, to say nothing of the actual work of superintending and constructing, which Rourke alone could look after.  It seemed ridiculous to me at the time that any one doing all this hard practical labor should not be provided with a clerk or an accountant to take at least some of this endless figuring off his hands.  At the same time, if he had been the least bit clever, he could have provided himself with one permanently by turning one of his so-called laborers into a clerk—­carrying a clerk as a laborer—­but plainly it had never occurred to him.  He depended on his family.  The preliminary labor alone of ordering and seeing that the material was duly shipped and unloaded was one man’s work; and yet Rourke was expected to do it all.

In spite of all this, however, he displayed himself a masterful worker.  I have never seen a better.  He preferred to superintend, of course, to get down into the pit or up on the wall, and measure and direct.  At the same time, when necessary to expedite a difficult task, he would toil for hours at a stretch with his trowel and his line and his level and his plumb-bob, getting the work into shape, and you would never hear a personal complaint from him concerning the weariness of labor.  On the contrary, he would whistle and sing until something went wrong, when suddenly you would hear the most terrific uproar of words:  “Come out av that!  Come out, now!  Jasus Christ, man, have ye no sinse at aall?  Put it down!  Put it down!  What arre ye doin’?  What did I tell ye?  Have ye no raison in ye, no sinse, ye h’athen nagur?”

“Great heavens!” I used to think, “what has happened now?”

You would have imagined the most terrible calamity; and yet, all told, it might be nothing of any great import—­a little error of some kind, more threatening than real, and soon adjusted.  It might last for a few moments, during which time the Italians would be seen hurrying excitedly to and fro; and then there would come a lull, and Rourke would be heard to raise his voice in tuneful melody, singing or humming or whistling some old-fashioned Irish “Come-all-ye.”