Then the blackness of the pit arose and filled the heart of Burney.  Sucking the corpse of his deceased dudheen, he staggered through his duties with his barrowful of stones and dirt, feeling for the first time that the curse of Adam was upon him.  Other men bereft of a pleasure might have recourse to other delights, but Burney had only two comforts in life.  One was his pipe, the other was an ecstatic hope that there would be no Speedways to build on the other side of Jordan.

At meal times he would let the other men go first into the grub-boat, and then he would go down on his hands and knees, grovelling fiercely upon the ground where they had been sitting, trying to find some stray crumbs of tobacco.  Once he sneaked down the river bank and filled his pipe with dead willow leaves.  At the first whiff of the smoke he spat in the direction of the boat and put the finest curse he knew on Corrigan—­one that began with the first Corrigans born on earth and ended with the Corrigans that shall hear the trumpet of Gabriel blow.  He began to hate Corrigan with all his shaking nerves and soul.  Even murder occurred to him in a vague sort of way.  Five days he went without the taste of tobacco—­he who had smoked all day and thought the night misspent in which he had not awakened for a pipeful or two under the bedclothes.

One day a man stopped at the boat to say that there was work to be had in the Bronx Park, where a large number of labourers were required in making some improvements.

After dinner Burney walked thirty yards down the river bank away from the maddening smell of the others’ pipes.  He sat down upon a stone.  He was thinking he would set out for the Bronx.  At least he could earn tobacco there.  What if the books did say he owed Corrigan?  Any man’s work was worth his keep.  But then he hated to go without getting even with the hard-hearted screw who had put his pipe out.  Was there any way to do it?

Softly stepping among the clods came Tony, he of the race of Goths, who worked in the kitchen.  He grinned at Burney’s elbow, and that unhappy man, full of race animosity and holding urbanity in contempt, growled at him:  “What d’ye want, ye—­Dago?”

Tony also contained a grievance—­and a plot.  He, too, was a Corrigan hater, and had been primed to see it in others.

“How you like-a Mr. Corrigan?” he asked.  “You think-a him a nice-a man?”

“To hell with ’m,” he said.  “May his liver turn to water, and the bones of him crack in the cold of his heart.  May dog fennel grow upon his ancestors’ graves, and the grandsons of his children be born without eyes.  May whiskey turn to clabber in his mouth, and every time he sneezes may he blister the soles of his feet.  And the smoke of his pipe—­may it make his eyes water, and the drops fall on the grass that his cows eat and poison the butter that he spreads on his bread.”

Though Tony remained a stranger to the beauties of this imagery, he gathered from it the conviction that it was sufficiently anti-Corrigan in its tendency.  So, with the confidence of a fellow-conspirator, he sat by Burney upon the stone and unfolded his plot.