“Then we will stay with you.”
My uncles opposed this plan, but Uncle Jack declared that he could not sleep if he went back; so the others gave in and we stayed, taking two hours turns, and the night passed slowly by.
Every now and then Piter had an uneasy fit, bursting out into a tremendous series of barks and howls, but there seemed to be no reason for the outcry.
He was worst during the watch kept by Uncle Jack and me after we had had a good sleep, and there was something very pathetic in the way the poor dog looked at us, as much as to say, “I wish I could speak and put you on your guard.”
But the night passed without any trouble; the men came in to their work, and with the darkness the fear seemed to have passed away. For there in the warm sunshine the water of the dam was dancing and sparkling, the great wheel went round, and inside the works the grindstones were whizzing and the steel being ground was screeching. Bellows puffed, and fires roared, and there was the clink clank of hammers sounding musically upon the anvils, as the men forged blades out of the improved steel my uncles were trying to perfect.
Business was increasing, and matters went so smoothly during the next fortnight that our troubles seemed to be at an end. In one week six fresh men were engaged, and after the sluggish times in London, where for a couple of years past business had been gradually dying off, everything seemed to be most encouraging.
Some of the men engaged were queer characters. One was a great swarthy giant with hardly any face visible for black hair, and to look at he seemed fit for a bandit, but to talk to he was one of the most gentle and amiable of men. He was a smith, and when he was at the anvil he used almost to startle me, he handled a heavy hammer so violently.
I often stood at the door watching him seize a piece of steel with the tongs, whisk it out of the forge with a flourish that sent the white-hot scintillations flying through the place, bang it down on the anvil, and then beat it savagely into the required shape.
Then he would thrust it into the fire again, begin blowing the bellows with one hand and stroke a kitten that he kept at the works with his unoccupied hand, talking to it all the time in a little squeaking voice like a boy’s.
He was very fond of swinging the sparkling and sputtering steel about my head whenever I went in, but he was always civil, and the less I heeded his queer ways the more civil he became.