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a
load in them."
"Yes," said Thomason, slowly,
"the wheelbarrows are stone and of course they are very heavy..."
”But they're very easy to push around even
with a load in them," White explained.
"They’re scientific wheelbarrows."
“No,” objected Jack in a low tone of
anguish.
"Yes," insisted White, pleasantly
sure of himself. "A small boy could fill one of those stone wheelbarrows
full of gold bars and wheel it around. The wheelbarrows are balanced just like
the doors. Instead of having the wheel out in front so that a man has to pick
up all the weight with his back, these wise old people put the wheel almost in
the middle and arranged the leverage of the shafts so that a child could put in
a balanced load and wheel the barrow around.”
Jack's heart was breaking. He left the table
and threw his chew out the door. He went
over to the stove with his cup. "Anybody want more coffee?" he asked.
No one did.
Bill studied Thomason and White for several
moments. Then he asked, “How many times you been in this tunnel."
"I've been in three times," said
White'. "That's counting the first time I fell in. Fred's been in twice; and my wife went part
way in the last time we was in."
Mrs. White stroked her blond hair and said.
"I thought my husband was romancing when he came home and told me what he
found in the mountains. He always was a romancer. One of the reasons I married
him was because he was such a romancer. I was sure he was just romancing about
this city he said he found. I didn’t believe it until they took me into it. It
is a little hard to believe, don’t you think?"