skit #19: draw a straight line when needed

Lao seems a quiet type, but a bit of a pixie's mischief in him, I say. Always drawing a line to cross. Not necessarily bred with the temperment to draw a straight line when needed. Something a bit askew, maybe he was a bit of a medicine man or a poppy sot back home. Part of his charm I suppose. I'm a track layer just the same, so at least he's got a douse of charm over me.

Right, so yesterday, Lao and I are up front spreading out gravel for the road bed, and he yelps, 'I don't see which way. Which way?'

And I think he's putting me on because it's my first week with the Central Pacific team, right? So I says, 'Well, I fancy it'll go straight, but we can check with Mr Mathers.' So I leave to get the foreman.

Mr Mathers was none too happy being disrupted during his libations, all the way back he's berating me, 'There're two ends to a railroad in America, Seamus?' and the like.

We get to Lao and I'm stunned. He laid gravel to hook right around, just like old miser Mathers' crooked cane. Lao explains, 'I'm tired of this work. Transcontinental? Never going to make it to China. I'm pulling the track back around so we can go home in America. Everyone can go home.''

Mathers' fulminations take Lao under aim. I try to subdue the foreman, explaining that Lao has a lively bit of old Puck in him, that Lao is just a guileless Chinaman, anything to get Mathers to calm. But Mathers sees, and I see, that Lao is serious. Lao keeps spreading out that gravel, and the track team was approaching his improvised bend.

The foreman, leaning half his weight on his whiskey and half his weight on his cane, hobbles over and gives Lao a crack to his kidneys. Lao winced a good bit after Mathers left.

It must have gotten the idea out of Lao's head. He joked it off a bit. Gaunt, coughing blood, and worse. But today he seems chipper. He says he's going home faster than I know it. There's no way he's getting out of the railroad union this time of winter. And there's no way Mathers'll let him spin this railroad round again. Lao laughed his pixie laugh.