And for the colour of his face when by-and-by I glanced at it ... well, I once saw a swarthy Italian fall under a sunstroke, and his face was much the same colour that Rooum’s negro face had gone; a cloudy, whitish green.

“Well—­you’ve seen it—­what do you think of it?” he gasped presently, turning a ghastly grin on me.

But it was night before the full horror of it had soaked into me.

Soon after that he disappeared again.  I wasn’t sorry.

* * * * *

Our big contract in the West End came on.  It was a time-contract, with all manner of penalty clauses if we didn’t get through; and I assure you that we were busy.  I myself was far too busy to think of Rooum.

It’s a shop now, the place we were working at, or rather one of these huge weldings of fifty shops where you can buy anything; and if you’d seen us there... but perhaps you did see us, for people stood up on the tops of omnibuses as they passed, to look over the mud-splashed hoarding into the great excavation we’d made.  It was a sight.  Staging rose on staging, tier on tier, with interminable ladders all over the steel structure.  Three or four squat Otis lifts crouched like iron turtles on top, and a lattice-crane on a towering three-cornered platform rose a hundred and twenty feet into the air.  At one end of the vast quarry was a demolished house, showing flues and fireplaces and a score of thicknesses of old wallpaper; and at night—­they might well have stood up on the tops of the buses!  A dozen great spluttering violet arc-lights half-blinded you; down below were the watchmen’s fires; overhead, the riveters had their fire-baskets; and in odd corners naphtha-lights guttered and flared.  And the steel rang with the riveters’ hammers, and the crane-chains rattled and clashed....  There’s not much doubt in my mind, it’s the engineers who are the architects nowadays.  The chaps who think they’re the architects are only a sort of paperhangers, who hang brick and terra-cotta on our work and clap a pinnacle or two on top—­but never mind that.  There we were, sweating and clanging and navvying, till the day shift came to relieve us.

And I ought to say that fifty feet above our great gap, and from end to end across it, there ran a travelling crane on a skeleton line, with platform, engine, and wooden cab all compact in one.

It happened that they had pitched in as one of the foremen some fellow or other, a friend of the firm’s, a rank duffer, who pestered me incessantly with his questions.  I did half his work and all my own, and it hadn’t improved my temper much.  On this night that I’m telling about, he’d been playing the fool with his questions as if a time-contract was a sort of summer holiday; and he’d filled me up to that point that I really can’t say just when it was that Rooum put in an appearance again.  I think I had heard somebody mention his name, but I’d paid no attention.