Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So Gowan got the job as Tomey’s Turl’s helper and at once Mr Harker began to keep him awake talking about Mr Snopes, talking about him with the kind of amoral amazement with which you would recount having witnessed the collision of a planet. According to Mr Harker, it began last year. One afternoon Tom Tom had finished cleaning his fires and was now sitting in the gangway smoking his pipe, pressure up and the safety-valve on the middle boiler blowing off, when Mr Snopes came in and stood there for a while, chewing tobacco and looking up at the whistling valve.

“How much does that whistle weigh?” he said.

“If you talking about that valve, about ten pounds,” Tom Tom said.

“Solid brass?” Mr Snopes said.

“All except that little hole it’s what you call whistling through,” Tom Tom said. And that was all then, Mr Harker said; it was two months later when he, Mr Harker, came on duty one evening and found the three safety-valves gone from the boilers and the vents stopped with one-inch steel screw plugs capable of a pressure of a thousand pounds and Tomey’s Turl still shovelling coal into the fireboxes because he hadn’t heard one of them blow off yet.

“And them three boiler heads you could poke a hole through with a sody straw,” Mr Harker said. “When I seen the gauge on the first boiler I never believed I would live to reach the injector.

“So when I finally got it into Turl’s head that that 100 on that dial meant where Turl wouldn’t only lose his job, he would lose it so good wouldn’t nobody never find the job nor him again neither, I finally got settled down enough to inquire where them safety-valves had went to.

“ ‘Mr Snopes took urn off,’ he says.

“ ‘What in hell for?’

“ ‘I dont know. I just telling you what Tom Tom told me. He say Mr Snopes say the shut-off float in the water tank aint heavy enough. Say that tank start leaking some day, so he going to fasten them three safety-valves on the float and weight it heavier.’

“ ‘You mean,’ I says. That’s as far as I could get. ‘You mean—’

“ ‘That’s what Tom Tom say. I don’t know nothing about it.’

“Anyhow they was gone; whether they was in the water tank or not, was too late to find out now. Until then, me and Turl had been taking it pretty easy after the load went off and things got kind of quiet. But you can bet we never dozed none that night. Me and him spent the whole of it time about on the coal pile where we could watch them three gauges all at once. And from midnight on, after the load went off, we never had enough steam in all them three boilers put together to run a peanut parcher. And even when I was home in bed, I couldn’t go to sleep. Time I shut my eyes I would begin to see a steam gauge about the size of a washtub, with a red needle big as a coal scoop moving up toward a hundred pounds, and I would wake myself up hollering and sweating.

“So come daylight enough to see; and I never sent Turl neither: I dumb up there myself and looked at that float. And there wasn’t no safety-valves weighting it neither and maybe he hadn’t aimed for them to be fastened to it where the first feller that looked in could a reached them. And even if that tank is forty-two foot deep I still could a opened the cock and dreened it. Only I just work there, Mr Snopes was the superintendent, and it was the day shift now and Tom Tom could answer whatever questions Joe Buffaloe would want to know in case he happened in and seen them thousand-pound screw plugs where safety-valves was supposed to been.

“So I went on home and that next night I couldn’t hardly get Turl to run them gauge needles up high enough to turn the low-pressure piston, let alone move the dynamos; and the next night, and the next one, until about ten days when the express delivered a box; Tom Tom had waited and me and him opened the box (It was marked C.O.D. in big black paint but the tag itself had been wrenched off and gone temporarily. ‘I know where he throwed it,’ Tom Tom said.) and taken them screw plugs out of the vents and put the three new safety-valves back on; and sho enough Tom Tom did have the crumpled-up tag: Mister Flem Snopes Power-plant Jefferson Miss C.O.D. twenty-three dollars and eighty-one cents.”

And now there was some of it which Mr Harker himself didn’t know until Uncle Gavin told him after Tom Tom told Uncle Gavin: how one afternoon Tom Tom was smoking his pipe on the coal pile when Mr Snopes came in carrying in his hand what Tom Tom thought at first was a number-three mule shoe until Mr Snopes took it into a corner behind the boilers where a pile of discarded fittings—valves, rods, bolts and such—had been accumulating probably since the first light was turned on in Jefferson; and, kneeling (Mr Snopes), tested every piece one by one into two separate piles in the gangway behind him. Then Tom Tom watched him test with the magnet every loose piece of metal in the whole boiler room, sorting the mere iron from the brass. Then Snopes ordered Tom Tom to gather up the separated brass and bring it to the office.