"Well," said Candlass, still in that low voice, "if you think you can behave yourself."
The man's expression changed. A waggish look came on his face.
"All right, Mr. Candlass."
"All right then," said Candlass. "You can wait around and I'll see—if I don't get plenty otherwise. Leave it that way."
Candlass looked over the group once more, then nodded to Mr. Smithers.
"All right. Come this way, boys," said Mr. Smithers. But though he straightened his back and thrust his neck into his collar in the recognised attitude of people who are not to be trifled with, there was something paternal that he could not efface from himself as he walked over to a little office on wheels that stood in a backward corner of the shed. In the wall of this box contrivance a small window opened on his arrival, and a clerk was beheld within.
Candlass said: "Line up, boys; one at a time."
Mike elbowed himself to leading position, looking round at his new friend. "You come with me, lad." And when some grumbled, "Well, well," he said. "We all have a chance."
The man to whom Candlass had decided to give another trial strolled backward and stood beyond the group so as to be last in the string.
"Now then, come along," said Smithers, and tapped twice with the end of a fountain pen on the little ledge before the diminutive window. The "Push," realising that all would have a chance, seeing how few there were, did not crowd now. There was more of: "You go ahead"—"No, that's all right, you go!"—than of anxiety. One by one they stepped up to the wicket, to one side of which Smithers leant, and in front of which Candlass had taken his stand. Each in turn exchanged a few quiet words with these two; the clerk within, pen in hand, bent over his tome, giving ear at the window. Once or twice Candlass looked round and beckoned to a man, when the group, milling instead of retaining the queue, was slow to decide who should go next. He did this by raising a hand, thumb and forefinger in air, looking keen and cold in some man's eye, and then flicking down the forefinger and dropping his hand to his side again. While this signing on was still in progress there entered the shed, slowly swinging his legs forward, clad in dirty khaki, large-hatted like the young man of whom we have already heard, a close-lipped, short-nosed youth. Candlass remarked him as he came in and said: "All right, you. Come ahead."