In two minutes Daniel was away with a couple of sheepdogs after him. He reflected on this, his first piece of work, and it pleased him. He was an accurate judge of stock and knew that he could estimate very closely the value of the heifers.
CHAPTER III
A THEATRE OF FAILURE
With his thoughts for company Brendon strode upon an errand to the high Moor. He had been at Ruddyford a fortnight, and liked the people, but his master troubled him, for he did not understand Mr. Woodrow's attitude. The farmer's silence puzzled Daniel more than hard words had done. His consolation was that a like reticence and apparent indifference were displayed to all.
THE OLD PEAT WORKS
Now Brendon climbed aloft to the lonely bosom of Amicombe Hill. He breasted the eastern shoulder of Great Links, and then stood a moment, startled by the strangeness of the scene before him. This field of industry had already passed into the catalogue of man's failures upon Dartmoor, and ruin marked the spot. Round about, as though torn by giant ploughs, the shaggy slope of the hill was seamed and ripped with long lines of darkness. A broken wall or two rose here and there, and radiating amid the desolation of bog and mire, old tramways ran red. In the midst of these morasses stood the peat works, like a mass of simmering, molten metal poured out upon the Moor and left to rust there. Low stone buildings with rotten roofs, gleaming corrugated iron still white, black walls, broken chimneys, and scattered debris of stone and steel huddled here in mournful decay. Everywhere cracked wheels, broken trolleys, twisted tram-lines, and dilapidated plant, sank into wreck and rot amid the growing things. Like a sea the waste billowed round about and began to swallow and smother this futile enterprise. Leaks and cracks gaped everywhere. Raw mountains of peat slowly grew green again under heath and grass and the wild sorrel. Here were miles of rusty wire in huge red tangles, that looked as though the lightning had played at cat's-cradle with them; here washes of dim and dingy green swept the hills; here flat liverworts and tumid fungus ate the woodwork like cancers; here beds of emerald sphagnum swallowed the old peat-knives and spades. Sections of the peat laid bare showed a gradual change in quality, from the tough and fibrous integument of heather-root and grass, to a pure cake, growing heavier and darker, until, two yards from the surface, it was inky black and soft as butter. From six to ten feet of this fuel spread in a layer of many million tons over the granite bones of Amicombe Hill. Immense quantities were already removed, but the enterprise failed utterly, and the great hill, where so much of sanguine toil had been expended, still stretched under the sky with little more than scratches on its face.
Brendon approached this cemetery of hope, to find a ghost there. The buildings, dwarfed by distance, soon towered above him as he reached them, and he found that they contained huge chambers internally blackened by the peat, yet illuminated by shafts of outer light that pierced into them. Through broken windows and gaping walls day came, and revealed immense, silent wheels, and bars thrust out of hollows, and deep pits. Great pipes stretched from darkness into darkness again; drums and tanks and forges stood up about him; mysterious apertures sundered the walls and gaped in the floors; strange implements appeared; stacks of peat-cake rose, piled orderly; broken bricks, silent machinery, hillocks of rubbish and dirt, heaps of metal and balks of timber loomed together from a dusky twilight, and choked these stricken and shadowy halls.
Dead silence reigned here to Daniel's ears, fresh from the songs of the wind on the Moor. But, as his eyes grew accustomed to the velvety darkness and fitful illumination of these earth-stained chambers, so his ears also were presently tuned to the peace of the place. Then, through the stillness, there came a sound, like some great creature breathing in sleep. It was too regular for the wind, too loud for any life. It panted steadily, and the noise appeared to come from beneath the listener's feet.