“We will not carry our water pails on our heads, you and I, will we, little Judith?” Anna asked, kind and motherly. “We want our brains to grow, and it might crowd them down; don’t you think so?”
The swarthy Jew looked up from the clay he was mixing with quick, instinctive gratitude. Judith was his child. He grinned a broad and rather hideous grin, and exclaimed in a broken dialect:—
“Das ist so, Kleine; shust listen to our lady! She knows. She says it right.”
Pierce Everett’s dark eyes flashed with sudden enthusiasm. Turning to Anna he bowed profoundly and said low to Keith, as well as to her:—
“There you have it! Barnabas has found your title—‘our lady’!”
Anna looked into Everett’s dark eager eyes with her quiet smile, and was about to speak, when a sudden noise of grating and rattling and horses’ hoofs behind them caused them all three to turn and look down the river. A horse and stone drag were approaching rapidly, driven by John Gregory, who stood on the drag, which was loaded with big clean pebbles from the river-bed. He wore a coarse grey flannel shirt, the collar turned off a little at the throat, and rough grey trousers tucked into high rubber boots, which reached to the thighs. The cloth cap on his head with its vizor bore a certain resemblance to a helmet, and altogether the likeness of the whole appearance to that of a Roman warrior in his chariot did not escape the three friends who watched its approach in the motley crowd around the basin.
Gregory drove his drag close up to the edge of the coping, now nearly laid, greeted the company with a courteous removal of his hat and a cordial Good-morning, then discharged the load of pebbles in a glinting heap on the soft red earth.
There was no conscious assumption of mastery or direction in Gregory’s manner, nothing could have been simpler or more democratic than the impartial comradery with which he joined the others, nevertheless the sense that the master was among them was instantly communicated throughout the little group. Up in the trench, nearly to the base of the cliffs which marked the entrance to the ravine, one Irishman said to the other, in a tone of satisfaction not unmixed with good-natured sarcasm:—
“Himsilf’s come now. The gintlemin masons will git to rights or they’ll lose their job, d’ye mind, Patrick?”
“Oh, ay,” said the other, “an’ the same to yersilf, if ye ivir noticed it.”