"Good-bye, lad, I'd stop with 'ee and share thy risk, but they'd know I was here, and my life wouldn't be worth the price of a pot o' beer. Don't forget, lad, if thou lowerst the water, to damp down the fire, and open the valves."
Jack, left to himself, clambered up to the window and entered the engine-house again, threw some fresh coal on the fire, heaped a quantity of coal against the door, and jammed several long iron bars against it. Then he lighted his pipe and sat listening, occasionally getting up to hold a lantern to the steam-gauge, as it crept gradually up.
"Twenty-five pounds," he said; "that will be enough to throw the water fifty or sixty yards on a level, and the door of the winding-engine's not more than thirty, so I can hold them both if they try to break in there."
He again banked up the fires, and sat thinking. Harry would be at the magistrate's by a quarter to six. By six o'clock Sir John could be on his way to Birmingham for troops; fifteen miles to drive—say an hour and a half. Another hour for the soldiers to start, and three hours to do the nineteen miles to the Vaughan, half-past eleven—perhaps half an hour earlier, perhaps half an hour later. There was no fear but there was plenty of water. The boiler was a large one, and was built partly into, partly out of the engine-house. That is to say, while the furnace-door, the gauges, and the safety-valve were inside, the main portion of the boiler was outside the walls. The blow-off cock was two inches in diameter, and the nozzle of the hose an inch and a half. It would take some minutes then, even with the steam at a pressure of twenty-five pounds to the inch, to blow the water out, and a minute would, he was certain, do all that was needed.
Not even when, upon the first day of his life in the pit, Jack sat hour after hour alone in the darkness, did the time seem to go so slowly as it did that evening. Once or twice he thought he heard footsteps, and crept cautiously up to the window to listen; but each time, convinced of his error, he returned to his place on a bench near the furnace. He heard the hours strike, one after another, on the Stokebridge church clock—eight, nine, ten—and then he took his post by the window and listened. A quarter of an hour passed, and then there was a faint, confused sound. Nearer it came, and nearer, until it swelled into the trampling of a crowd of many hundreds of men. They came along with laughter and rough jests, for they had no thought of opposition—no thought that anyone was near them. The crowd moved forward until they were within a few yards of the engine-house, and then one, who seemed to be in command, said, "Smash the door in with your sledges, lads."
Jack had, as they approached, gone down to the boiler, and had turned the blow-off cock, and the boiling water swelled the strong leathern hose almost to bursting. Then he went back to the window, threw it open, and stood with the nozzle in his hand.
"Hold!" he shouted out in loud, clear tones. "Let no man move a step nearer for his life."
The mob stood silent, paralyzed with surprise. Jack had spoken without a tinge of the local accent, and as none of the boys were there, his voice was quite unrecognized. "Who be he?" "It's a stranger!" and other sentences, were muttered through the throng.
"Who be you?" the leader asked, recovering from his surprise.
"Never mind who I am," Jack said, standing well back from the window, lest the light from the lanterns which some of the men carried might fall on his face. "I am here in the name of the law. I warn you to desist from your evil design. Go to your homes; the soldiers are on their way, and may be here any minute. Moreover, I have means here of destroying any man who attempts to enter."