The Doers Part 19

So he went where he had left his cart, and he looked for the pretend little boy, but he had gone away, and David couldn't find him. And he looked for his cat, and he couldn't see her either.

So he took up the handle of his cart, and he walked along to his house, dragging his cart, with his shovel and his hoe and the chestnuts all rattling together in the bottom of it.

And that's all.

XII

THE POLE-MEN STORY

Once upon a time there was a little boy, and he was almost five years old, and his name was David. And there weren't any other children near for him to play with, so he used to play happily all by himself.

He had his cat and his cart and his shovel and his hoe, and he always wore his overalls when he was playing.

One morning he had just started to wander along the road toward the corner of the next street.

He wasn't allowed to go beyond that corner, but he could look and see what was coming, and perhaps he could see the postman and the black dog.

His cat was walking along beside him, looking up into his face, and he was dragging his cart, with his shovel and his hoe rattling in the bottom of it, for he might want to play in the sand of the gutter.

But before he got more than halfway to the corner, he heard a great rattling and shouting, and two horses came around the corner.

They made a very wide turn, because they were dragging a wagon, and behind that came two great logs which looked like trees, except that they were all smoothed off.

And David wondered where the other ends of the logs were, for he couldn't see anything but logs coming around the corner.

Then came a pair of strong wheels that the logs rested upon, and presently there were the other ends of the logs, and David knew that the logs were either telephone poles or electric light poles, for he had seen a great many of both kinds.

There was a man driving, and two other men, and they had some other smaller poles and some shovels in the wagon.

David stopped short, and his cat stopped, and they watched the wagon, with the poles behind it, go slowly down the road until it had got a little way beyond his house.

Then it stopped, and the men jumped out, and they began to look up in the air.

David wondered why they were doing that. He wondered so much that he walked along, with his cat walking beside him and his cart coming after, to ask the men.

But before he got near enough to them to ask, they had stopped looking up in the air, and they talked to each other, and David knew by what they said that they had been looking to see where the telephone line to his house stopped.

Then they started the horses, and the men walked beside them, and they walked about as far as a big boy could throw a stone, and there they stopped.

And the men undid the ropes from the long logs, and they rolled one of them to one side and tipped it so that its big end was on the ground, and they tied the ropes on to the other log again.

Then they got two of the smaller poles from the wagon, and they held up the small end of the log with the small poles; and the wagon started and the wheels went out from under the log and left it.

Then the men took away the small poles and the log fell upon the ground, and it made a big booming noise as it fell.

The other log was unloaded in the same way not far from the corner of the new house, and they led the horses to a tree and tied them; and they took the shovels and all the little poles and the other things out of the wagon.

The shovels were strange-looking things, with long, straight handles and queer blades, more like long mustard-spoons than shovels; and the little poles had sharp spikes in the ends, and some of the poles were not much longer than clothes-poles, and some were a great deal longer; and there were two sharp-pointed iron bars.

The men took all their things to the place where the first pole lay on the ground, and two of them took bars and the other took one of the shovels.

And the men with the bars stuck them into the ground and loosened the dirt, and the other man scooped out the dirt with his big mustard-spoon. Then some more dirt was loosened and that was scooped out with the shovel.

The hole that they were digging was not much bigger around than the end of the pole which would go into it.

The hole kept getting deeper, so that a common shovel wouldn't have got up any dirt at all; but the man with the mustard-spoon shovel just gave it a little twist, and lifted it out with dirt in it.

Pretty soon they had the hole dug deep enough.

It was so deep that, if a man could have stood on the bottom of it, he could have just seen out, if he stood on his tiptoes.

But only a slim man could have got into the hole. A fat man would have stuck fast as soon as his legs were in.

Then the men put down their bars and the shovel, and got the little poles, and went where the long log lay.

And they rolled it over with bars which were something like tongs, except that they had only one handle; and they rolled it until the big end of the log was just over the hole.

Then they took the shortest small poles with spikes in the ends, and they put them where they could reach them quickly.

And they all took hold of the end of the log and lifted it as high as they could reach; and one of the men reached out quickly for his spike pole, while the other two men held the log, and he jabbed the spike hard into the log and held it while another man got his spike pole and jabbed the spike hard into the log.

Then the third man jabbed the spike of his pole in, and they all lifted together, and the b.u.t.t end of the log slipped a little way into the hole.

It couldn't go all the way to the bottom, because the big pole wasn't up far enough yet, and the b.u.t.t end struck the side of the hole.

Then they got longer spike poles, one man at a time, and they lifted again, and the big pole slipped a little farther down into the hole.

And one of the men jabbed his spike pole in at another place, and then the other men did, and they lifted again, and the big pole went _thump!_ on the bottom of the hole.

And the men left their spike poles sticking in, all around, and jammed the other ends into the ground to hold the big pole up straight while they filled in the dirt around it.

David had been watching the men all the time, but he was careful not to get near, because he had seen how the big pole bounced around when it was unloaded.

His cat was not so careful, and she was almost hit by one of the spike poles when the man threw it down, and she scampered home as fast as she could go.

But David didn't pay any attention to her, and the men were too busy to notice.

When the dirt was pounded hard around the pole, the men took up their things, and walked along to the place where they had unloaded the other pole; and David walked along, too, dragging his cart.

He would have liked to take some of the things in his cart, but they were all too big, for he asked one of the men.

And the man looked at his cart, and he looked at David, and he laughed and shook his head.

"But you be very careful not to get too near," he said. "If the pole should get away from us, there's no knowing what it would do."