The morning frost was still melting off the oak boat ramp stringers. Just then, a furious argument erupted between two levee work crews at the mouth of Wharf Street. Eren Tal and Pella Rook heard the shouting from fifty yards away. They walked along the stone retaining wall, the cold river draft carrying the angry voices over the rushing sound of the Gray Rush.
Foreman Kray, his face flushed and his fists planted on the hips of his leather work trousers, stood toe-to-toe with Foreman Marlo, a veteran canal mason whose crew was responsible for the stone drain-tunnels of the northern dry dock. Between their boots, a deep drainage trench had been excavated through the river gravel. They exposed an old lead trunk pipe that was sweating cold stone slow leak.
‘If you vent your cellar water chute into my boat ramp trench, Marlo, you’ll drown my saw-pits!’ Kray roared, jabbing a thick forefinger toward his timber stacks. ‘I have sixty seasoned hemlock baulks sitting on the low skids! If your muddy overflow wets that timber, it will twist like barley-sugar before the carpenters can frame the water gate!’
‘And if I don’t vent the under-road drain here, Kray, the backing-up pressure will blow the flat stone slabs off the public washhouse floor!’ Marlo shouted back, brandishing a heavy iron crowbar. ‘I have thirty laundresses working over copper tubs! Do you want sixty gallons of boiling wash-water dumping onto their feet because your lumber might get damp?’
