Perhaps in different places and surroundings a
submission so stoic might have impressed him; in gentlemen who tucked
their dirty trousers in their muddy boots and lived only for the gold
they dug, it did not seem to him heroic. Nor was he mollified as
he stood beside the rude refreshment bar--a few planks laid on
trestles--and drank his coffee beneath the dripping canvas roof, with an
odd recollection of his boyhood and an inclement Sunday-school picnic.
Yet these men had been living in this shiftless fashion for three weeks!
It exasperated him still more to think that he might have to wait there
a few days longer for the water to subside sufficiently for him to make
his examination and report. As he took a proffered seat on a candle-box,
which tilted under him, and another survey of the feeble makeshifts
around him, his irascibility found vent.
"Why, in the name of God, didn't you, after you had been flooded out
ONCE, build your cabins PERMANENTLY on higher ground?"
Although the tone of his voice was more disturbing than his question, it
pleased one of the loungers to affect to take it literally.
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