CHAPTER XXVIII.
Down the middle of the big T-shaped wool-shed, in two rows of six pens each, with an aisle between them, the bleating sheep were massed. They had been driven into that aisle and thus distributed, as a crowd of soldiers might be packed into their pews at church, and twelve little gates had then been shut upon them. Each gate had a corresponding one at the opposite end of the pen, opening upon a broad lane of floor, and facing a doorway into outside pens and the sunny paddocks of the background. Between gate and door, on his own section of the boarded lane, a sweating, bare-armed man with shears performed prodigies of strength and skill. Every few minutes he snatched a heavy sheep from the pen beside him, flung it with a round turn into a sitting posture between his knees, and with the calm indifference to its violent objections of the spider to those of the fly that he makes into a parcel, sliced off its coat like a cook peeling a potato. The fleece gently fell upon the floor, as you may see an unnoticed shawl slip from an old lady's shoulders, and before it could realise what had happened, the poor naked animal found itself shot through the doorway, to stagger headlong down the sloping stage that was its returning path to freedom. Twelve of these stalwart and strenuous operators, lining the long walls at regular intervals, six a side, were at it with might and main (payment by results being the rule in this department of industry), and attendant boys strolled up and down, picking the fleeces from the floor and carrying them to the sorter's table. One was the tar-boy, whose business it was to dab a brushful of tar upon any scarlet patch appearing upon a white under-coat where the shears had clipped too close. The sorter or classer stood behind his long table, above and at right angles to the lines of sheep-pens and shearers. Near him on either hand were racks like narrow loose-boxes, built against the walls; behind him the hydraulic press cranked and creaked as its attendants fed and manipulated it, and the great bales, that others were sewing up, weighing, and branding, were mounting high in the transepts of the building—the two arms of the capital T. The air was thick with woolly particles and the smell of sheep; the floor was dark and slippery, and everything one touched humid with the impalpable grease of the silky fleeces circulating all about the shed. Strict, downright, dirty business was the order of the day.
The manager—Jim Urquhart, grey-bearded, in a battered felt hat and a slouchy old tweed suit—stood by the sorter's table, his wide-ranging, vigilant eye suddenly fixed upon it. As each fleece was brought up, shaken out, trimmed, tested with thumb and finger, rolled into a light bundle, inside out, and flung into one or another of the adjacent racks, he followed the process as if it were something new to him. The shade of difference in the texture of the staple of one fleece as compared with another appeared of more concern to him than the absolute difference, which seemed to shout for notice, between Deborah Dalzell and the other features of the scene.
A snowy, lacy petticoat all but swept the greasy floor. An equally spotless skirt, fresh from the laundry, gathered up in one strong pendant hand, gleamed like light against its background of greasy woodwork and greasy wool. The majestic figure of the lady of Redford advanced towards him. Her lord strolled behind her. Often—but not for many a long day—had the vision of her beautiful face come to Jim in this fashion, a radiance upon prosaic business that it was not allowed to interfere with; now, for the first time, his eye avoided, his heart shrank from recognising it.
Then he lifted his gaze at last, for she was close beside him. And what a ray of loving old-comradeship shone on him from those star-bright orbs of hers, undulled by the years that had lightly frosted her dark hair. She put out her hand, and held it out until he had apologised for his greasy paw, and given it to her warm grasp.
"Why haven't you been to see me—to see us?" she asked him, smiling. "Didn't you know we came home last night?"
"I thought you might be tired—or unpacking," Jim lamely excused himself. "But whenever it is convenient to you, Deb—Mrs Dalzell—I am always close by; I can come at any time."
He looked at her husband.
"Claud, you remember Jim?"