He waved to his foreman. "Morning, Mordechai."

"Morning, Chester." The foreman waved back. It was an odd wave; he'd lost a couple of fingers from his right hand in a childhood farm accident. But he could do more with tools with three fingers than most men could with five. He'd spent years in the Navy before returning to the civilian world. He had to be close to sixty now, but he had the vigor of a much younger man.

"Hey, Joe. Morning, Fred. What's up, Jose? How are you, Virgil?" Martin nodded to the other builders, who were just getting started on the day's work.

"How's it going, Chester?" Fred said, and then, "Look out-here comes Dushan. Get busy quick, so he can't suck you into a card game."

"What do you say, Dushan?" Chester called.

Dushan nodded back. "How you is?" he said in throatily accented English. He came from some Slavic corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his last name consisted almost entirely of consonants. And Fred's warning was the straight goods. Dushan made only a so-so builder (he liked the sauce more than he might have, and didn't bother keeping it a secret), but what he couldn't persuade a deck of cards to do, nobody could. Chester would have bet he picked up more money gambling than he did with a hammer and saw and screwdriver.

"Come on, boys. Enough jibber-jabber," Mordechai said. "Time to earn what they pay us."

He wasn't the kind of foreman who sat on his hind end drinking coffee and yelling at people who did stuff he didn't like. He worked as hard as any of the men he bossed-probably harder. If you couldn't work for Mordechai, you probably couldn't work for anybody.

Nailing rafters to the ridgepole, Chester turned to Jose, who was doing the same thing on the other side. "You know what Mordechai reminds me of?" he said.