The Doers Part 7

And he put his shovel into his cart, and took up the handle of the cart, and his cat came running, and he went toward the new house, dragging his cart behind him with his shovel rattling in the bottom of it. His cat ran on ahead.

Long before he got as far as the house, he saw some men's heads bob up in the middle of the road; heads without any bodies to them.

And he went nearer, and he saw that the men were in a trench that they had dug in the road, as far as the new house.

Some long iron pipes were in the gutter. The pipes were big enough for his kitty to crawl through.

He wanted to ask somebody about them, but there was n.o.body there except the two men in the trench, so he walked along until he came to the mortar box.

The mortar man wasn't there. He had gone into the house with a hod of mortar.

So David looked all about for somebody.

He saw the pile of sand with his hoe sticking out of it, but he didn't pay any attention to it, for he wasn't thinking about hoes then.

And he saw the bones of the house almost all up, so that they made a pretty good skeleton, and the carpenters were putting up the rafters: the beams that hold up the roof.

And other carpenters had just begun nailing boards on to the outside of the up-and-down beams, and there was a great noise of hammering.

At last he saw the foreman.

"h.e.l.lo!" David called.

There was such a noise, with the carpenters all hammering, that the foreman didn't hear him.

"h.e.l.lo!" called David again, louder.

Still the foreman didn't hear.

"h.e.l.lo!" David shouted as loud as he could shout. "_h.e.l.lo, Jonathan!_"

The foreman heard, that time, and he looked around and laughed.

"Ho, Davie!" he said in a big round voice. "Just wait a minute and I'll be down there."

So David waited a minute, then two, then five minutes, and the foreman came. Then David asked his question.

"What are the men doing in the road?"

"They're digging a trench. When they get it done, they'll lay water pipes in it. And the water will come all the way from the reservoir on the hill, and it will go through pipes that are already laid under the streets, and it will come to this street, and it will turn into this street and go along, and some will go into your house, and some will keep on to this house and go in through a pipe that will be under the ground just the other side of the sand-pile.

"That pipe will go through the cellar wall, and to all the faucets in the house, so that when the little boy who will live here wants to wash his hands or take a bath, he will turn a faucet and the water will come running. There, now."

"Oh," said David, "will a little boy live here?"

"I don't know who will live here, Davie," the foreman answered. "There most generally is a little boy or so in any family that lives in this town."

"Oh," said David; and he nodded his head, and he saw a faucet that was nailed to a board.

And the faucet was on the end of a pipe which stuck up from the ground near the mortar box.

"Why," he said, "there's a faucet, and water will come. I've seen the mortar man get it there."

"Yes," said the foreman. "We had to have water to use. It comes through this pipe that lies on top of the ground all the way to your house. See?"

And the foreman showed David the pipe. It was hidden by the long gra.s.s.

"They're going to lay the pipes now, Davie. Do you want to see them do it?"

So David put his little hand into the foreman's big one, and they went together to where the men were.

The men had got up out of the trench, and they were going to take up one of the iron pipes that lay in the gutter.

Just as they began to lift it, out of one end of it popped David's kitty. She scurried around and popped into the end of another pipe, and all the men laughed.

"Funny kitty," said David.

Then the men took hold of the pipe that the cat had been in at first, and they lifted it, one at each end, and they carried it and put it down beside the trench.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUT POPPED DAVID'S KITTY]

Then they got into the trench again, and they took hold of the pipe and lowered it to the bottom.

David couldn't see what the men were doing then, and he went to the edge of the trench and squatted there and watched.

He saw the end of a pipe sticking out of the ground into the trench.

It looked as if it had been in the ground a long time.

"What is that?" he asked the foreman.

The foreman said it was the end of the old pipe, and there was a place near his house where they could put a long iron thing into the ground, down as far as the pipes, and turn it and let the water into this pipe. The long iron thing was like a clock-key.

"And Davie," he said, "you see that one end of each pipe flares out bigger than the other end. The men put the small end of one pipe into the flaring end of the next. You'll see."

So David looked and the men fitted the small end of the new pipe into the flaring end of the old one, and they blocked the new pipe up with dirt and stones until it was just right.

Then one of the men took some things that were in the trench. All that David saw was what looked like some old frazzled-out rope, and he laid the things he had taken up around the new pipe in the joint, and he hammered them in tight with a kind of a dull chisel. That was so that the water shouldn't leak through.

When the men had the old frazzled-out rope all hammered in tight, the other man came and brought him something that looked all snaky, and it was s.h.i.+ny like the lead of a pencil, and it waved about as if it were heavy and it seemed to be all moist like mud.

And the man took this snaky, wavy thing, and he wrapped it around the pipe, and he drove it into the joint until it looked like a part of the pipe.

Then he felt it all over carefully, and he stood up and looked at it.

And he made up his mind that it was all right, and the other man began to shovel dirt down into the trench, and they punched the dirt until it was all hard under the pipe and at the sides.

Then they went to the gutter and picked up another pipe.