You must understand that all the while that this house rebuilding was going on there was also a corresponding activity being maintained in house wrecking. This latter activity yielded the materials for carrying out the first. The whole thing had begun to grow to quite sizeable proportions - and perhaps like Pharoh of Old, George found he needed constant levies of workers to maintain the ranks. Chuck and I were now only two among an ever-growing multitude of devotees who regularly looked to their latter-day Fagin for direction and shelter...

    Thus my story now begins to divide and multiply and run in many rivulets...

    For one, these wrecking, building, scouting, foraging crews poured forth weekly like Army Ants from their nest - reporting back to headquarters for direction and encouragement. Several things were happening ...

    There was West Point, for instance. You know - West Point - the Military Academy on the West Bank, unfortunately situated within only a short cigar's chew from Haverstraw. Once, they sold off some marble slabs at West point - in some old stables they were tearing down. (Mounts were stabled in high-style in grander days there). George was successful high bidder - so over we went to load the slabs one morning and thus did the Master gain entrance to these sacred grounds... (We later broke these big slabs up and paved the cellar at Ridgefield with them: you shall hear more about that cellar...).

    That's when I first met "Sarge" and Tony-the-Mexican. Both were West Point Men (as George liked to refer to them) - but truth to tell they were just old-line regular Army hacks putting in their days as members of the permanently-assigned cadre there - not "plebes" or cadets or anything like that. Sarge liked his cigars nearly as well as George; Tony-the-Mexican's claim to fame was that he always took his pants off when he arrived for work, preferring to work all day in his purple boxer shorts... When his shift was up, back on went the pants.

    Soon - George determined that many of these old-line guys were family men, and hungry for extra cash beyond their army pay. Many had skills - electricians, cooks, carpenters and so on which kept the wheels turning at West Point. Soon, increasing numbers of these stalwarts began to join our regular Saturday morning line-ups. Their names were entered in the Book of Kells. They were a welcome lot - cheerful and full of great tales, themselves. And they fell right in with George and his schemes and became eager participants with the rest of us civilians and lesser mortals.

    This came in time to get out of hand. It started, when one of their number - some old Mess Sargeant - took it upon himself to begin "liberating" stuff from the Quartermaster stores at the Point, and bring it along. He would arrive with tons of Army provender - in off-duty "six-bys" and Command Cars (George's favorite - in which he would sit like Patton on review, chewing away contentedly while his "troops" (no longer "hands") carried out his bidding). The cook brought O.D.-colored gallon cans of jam, and peanut butter in camo wraps - and whole fresh chickens, and bread and so on. For the lucky ones working at "headquarters" (the new designation for Haverstraw) the smells of midday dinner rose by 10:30 a.m. or so up through the rafters - even to those of us maybe slung by ropes far aloft and busy grinding bricks among the chimney pots and all... Ym! Smells good...

    In time, "Sarge" and others added OD field caps, then complete suits of fatigues for us to wear - and knitted OD sweaters in cold weather and so on. I began to wonder if I could look forward to a mustering-out bonus when this bubble should burst...

    And burst it did one day. It burst - but in the end only shrank a bit - it never was entirely eliminated from the Government's side after that till George himself had died... Circumstances were that these guys were only supposed to sign themselves out at West Point to George on weekends when they were free on their own time. But it got so that - "human nature being human nature", right? - they began ducking out and covering for one another while on active duty. One day, the Commandant couldn't muster up enough troops to do some bidding of his and stormed into the cadre quarters at the Point, demanding to know what was going on.

    All anyone could tell him - or show him on the sign-out sheets - was that nearly everyone was signed out to "Mr. George W. Rhine's place".

    "WHO AND WHAT IN HELL IS GEORGE W. RHINE AND HOW IS IT THAT HE HAS BROUGHT WEST POINT MILITARY ACADEMY TO A SCREECHING HALT?", roared this red-faced Commandant - as was reliably reported by several witnesses to George at a later date.

    And so "regulations" as to off-time work were changed and tightened at the Point, but the net effect was only to slightly reduce but not completely shut-off this important labor-and-materials conduit. George loved this tale, and loved to tell it. He was an old military hand himself - having served no less with Black Jack Pershing in the Mexican border disputes and pursuit of Pancho Villa back before the First War. And he had many tales he told of those days, too - of Mexican bordellos, and muleskinning, and blacksmithing work he had done as an outfitter in the ranks...