Jedao takes a sip of the latte, makes an odd expression, then drinks a larger gulp.
"I'm a savage thing. But sometimes even I get tired of killing. I suppose it's no wonder I'm thinking of those days. I got out of China in '64, and America felt just as ruined as I did. But it was all new, brash and square and utterly foreign, and that helped. And building something helped. I learned the language in time to be a boss for a crew of a dozen, who didn't know ten words of English between them. They'd all been in the Taiping rebellion too, of course, although I'd never met them before."
Some part of his mind can't help comparing the Dominos and the brothers who've thrown in with them to his old railway boys; it's a bad habit of his, getting attached after losing too much. He talks about the work instead, since Fives is fascinated, all the digging for flat stable trenches, blasting with raw black powder and then nitroglycerin through the Sierras, running the flatcar up the to the railhead and kicking the heavy rails off two by two and laying them on the ties. He uses a pair of straws and a sugar packet to demonstrate the proper method of bolting a fishplate.
no subject
"I'm a savage thing. But sometimes even I get tired of killing. I suppose it's no wonder I'm thinking of those days. I got out of China in '64, and America felt just as ruined as I did. But it was all new, brash and square and utterly foreign, and that helped. And building something helped. I learned the language in time to be a boss for a crew of a dozen, who didn't know ten words of English between them. They'd all been in the Taiping rebellion too, of course, although I'd never met them before."
Some part of his mind can't help comparing the Dominos and the brothers who've thrown in with them to his old railway boys; it's a bad habit of his, getting attached after losing too much. He talks about the work instead, since Fives is fascinated, all the digging for flat stable trenches, blasting with raw black powder and then nitroglycerin through the Sierras, running the flatcar up the to the railhead and kicking the heavy rails off two by two and laying them on the ties. He uses a pair of straws and a sugar packet to demonstrate the proper method of bolting a fishplate.