"Measure it."
The tape showed five hundred forty.
"By the agreement, you couldn't go beyond four hundred and twenty feet, with eight ramp openings."
"Them damn' niggers must a moved the stob I put in. We won't go no further."
The outcrop-scraping continued fifty feet, before another opening was made.
World-unsettling events were happening, during the weeks when this minor dispute disturbed the serenity of relations on the mountain between owner and contractors. The same day that Pelham reported the repeated trespass on the easy outcrop, the startled papers told of the vaster trespass across the convenient miles of Belgium, which was bitterly contesting the gray-green flood of alien soldiers. The father turned from the headlines to discuss, with caustic vigor, the annoyance nearer home.
"There's no way to stop it, Pelham. They'll rob the surface, no matter what the contract reads. It's so much cheaper to get at ... lazy scoundrels! It 'ud take six years in court to settle it. Meanwhile, the mine would be locked up tighter than a barrel."
"You could get damages."
"Not a cent ... not solvent. Keep your eye on them; we'll play them along. Bad as this war promises to be, somebody's liable to need our iron. Prices must boost; the Hewin contract will hold our cost down. We won't lose."
There were few minds in Adamsville, at this time, that saw even this much connection between the remote struggle and placid home affairs.