Sons of Fortune Read Online Free

of mud. The northwest wind cast shivering nets of ripples over the water.
    “Have you been to the Crimea before?” John asked the officer.
    “Not on the Mohawk . I was on the Vectis when we carried stores to Balaclava.”
    “What is it really like out there?”
    “You feel no danger in the port, but the muddle is terrible. It’s a disgrace beyond my power of description, sir. If your railway moves those mountains out of Balaclava and gets the stuff where it’s really wanted, you’ll do a lot to win this war.”
    John smiled at him gratefully. “That is exactly what I shall tell my men. As to their behaviour, you need have no fear there.”
    They went inside then. John pointed to Walter and gave the two boys a push in his direction. After the cold air on the balcony the heat in the warehouse and the stink of men hit them like a wall; it almost pushed John physically off balance. While he recovered he looked down from the improvised rostrum—a large hatch cover balanced on four sacks—and surveyed his navvies. He could understand the officer’s alarm. A railway navvy was a man of legendary strength and violence. It took a year for even the best farm worker or building labourer to put on enough muscle to match the navvies; but the violence that had made them the scourge of the countryside in the early days of the railways had now become quite rare, thanks to the steady work and orderly conditions provided by the big contractors like Brassey and Peto—and, to be sure, by John himself. Even so, five hundred of those huge-muscled, self-reliant titans made an awesome assembly. Even John, who moved among them every day, felt it; and if he had just put his hand to the controls of the biggest leviathan steam engine in the world, he would not feel master of a power half so great as this.
    “How many of ye,” he shouted, “began on the London–Birmingham line?”
    There was a puzzled stir. It was not the way they expected him to start. In the gloom he saw only a few dozen hands raised up.
    “Thirty or forty. And the rest of you younger, I’ll be bound. Eighteen years is a lifetime in this trade. The reason I ask is because that’s where I began—on the London–Birmingham. I made the running at Camden up cuttings that would test the strongest of us still. I near lost a leg on the banks at Tring. I carried the remains of four good men out of Kilsby Tunnel in sacks.”
    The silence was now absolute. There was no other audience in the world to whom he could talk in such direct shorthand and who would instantly grasp his meaning. Boy and Caspar were thrilled. They loved all his tales of navvy days.
    “Aye. There’s things about the navvying life that folk outside will never fathom.” A murmur of agreement began to rise. He grinned. “Do ye remember how they feared us? There’s folk who still hush their young ones with threats of navvies. Ye’d think we were hordes of Tartars. Yet what did we do? We fired a few hedges. We invited the farmers’ geese to an early supper.” They began to laugh.
    “We maybe bloodied a nose or two and broke the odd window. And we left behind a few spare feet for baby boots.”
    He let the laughter rise and die. “It was little enough to fear us for. Yet if they had known what we were really about, they would have both feared and marvelled.” His raised finger and glinting eyes, darting this way and that over the crowd, promised a rich secret.
    “For what have we really done? I’ll tell you: We’ve left behind us a land enriched beyond dreams. We’ve changed the face of this world! Yes, you, and you, and you—you’ve done it. D’ye remember that time when a bale of raw American cotton in Liverpool docks was sent to Manchester and was back in Liverpool the very next day as woven cloth ready to export? Our metals made that possible. We’ve given a new bloodstream to civilization. We’ve made our mark on the face of time! We did that.
    “But have ye ever stopped to wonder why