He was willing, and what Murphy told him to do he did.

But it was Murphy who did the hard work, who planned for them both.
Presently Mike went bowlegging to camp to start their dinner, and Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it rested.

He still whispered a sibilant "a-ah!" with every blow of the hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it should because he had lost so many of his teeth and had a habit of pinching his lower jaw up against his upper.
The professor came back with his sample of rock--with a pocketful of samples--just as Murphy had finished and was wiping his thick glasses on a soiled, blue calico handkerchief with large white polka-dots on the border and little white polka-dots in the middle.

He turned toward the professor inquiringly, warned by the scrunching footsteps that some one approached.

But he was blind as a bat--so he declared--without his glasses, so he finished polishing them and placed them again before his bleared, powder-burned eyes before he knew who was coming.
"An' it's you back already," he greeted, in his soft Irish voice, that tilted up at the end of every sentence, so that, without knowing what words he spoke, one would think he was asking question after question and never making a statement at all.