“We are feet below the well bottom. Are you satisfied at last, Mr. Pilbrow?” he said, really in a quite quarrelsome way. He had been cheated, he felt, of the fruits of his own condescension.
“No,” snarled Joshua, “I’m not. Here was mud, perhaps, once. It was a loaded box of iron—we know that. It may have sunk far.”
Mr. Sant laughed offensively. The best of us bear awakening from engaging dreams badly. As for me, I had desisted from working when he did, and was sitting disconsolately on the lower part of the shaft, fumbling with my fingers in the fracture.
All in a moment the blood seemed to rush to my heart, making me gasp. I jumped to my feet.
“Here it is!” I screeched. “I’ve found it! I felt it!”
My fingers, burrowing through the crack into a choke of sand, had touched upon the iron-bound corner of a box.
They were all up and swarming about me directly. One by one, quite cavalier to each other in their eagerness to dive and feel, they exclaimed and fell back, Some people say that colours are indiscernible by moonlight. I can answer for the flush which suffused our rector’s cheek as he looked at Joshua.
But it was Uncle Jenico who commanded the situation.
“We must rope this lowest piece, and pull it away from the other,” he cried, full of bustle and excitement. “What a providential thought was this wrench of mine! Hey, my boys? Ha-ha!”
It was brilliantly the obvious course, and at the word we were all scurrying to put it into execution, Uncle Jenico directing us in a perfect and quite lovable rapture of self-importance. He and I, when the rope had been readjusted to its new position, hurried to manipulate the machine, while the others remained to watch the result of our efforts on the huge pipe of masonry. We seized the spokes.