She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house
uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did
not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.
This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat
with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on
the ice, unattended and alone.
CHAPTER XI.
CAP'S AMBUSTER'S SKIFF.
It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk Foundry.
The Superintendent had come back with his pocket full of orders.
Everybody, from the Czar of Russia to the President of the Guano
Republic, was in the market for machinery. Crisis was gone by.
Prosperity was come. The world was all ready to move, and only waited
for a fresh supply of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and
other such muscular creatures of iron, to push and tug and swing and
revolve and set Progress a-going.
Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying the demand. It was
well understood by this time that the iron Wade made was as stanch
as the man who made it. Dunderbunk, therefore, Head and Hands, must
despatch.
So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious Foundry. The men bestirred
themselves. The furnaces rumbled. The engine thumped. The drums in the
finishing-shop hummed merrily their lively song of labor. The four
trip-hammers--two bull-headed, two calf-headed--champed, like
carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they
roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus,--
"Now, then! hit hard!
Strike while Iron's hot.
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