“Ay, mester,” came in a growl, and shortly after the sound of steel being ground upon the sharply-spinning stones was heard. An hour later a couple of men were fitting bands to some of the wheels, and mending others by lacing them together.
I was standing watching them as they fitted a new band to Gentles’ wheel, while he stood with his bared arms folded, very eager to begin work again.
“Ain’t it a cruel shaäme?” he whispered. “Here’s me, a poor chap paid by the piece, and this morning half gone as you may say. This job’s a couple o’ loaves out o’ my house.”
He wiped a tear out of the corner of each half-closed eye as he stared at me in a miserable helpless kind of way, and somehow he made me feel so annoyed with him that I felt as if I should like to slap his fat face and then kick him.
I went away very much exasperated and glad to get out of the reach of temptation, leaving my uncles busily superintending the fitting of the bands, and helping where they could do anything to start a man on again with his work. And all the time they seemed to make very light of the trouble, caring for nothing but getting the men started again.
I went down into the smithy, where Pannell was at work, and as I entered the place he looked for a moment from the glowing steel he was hammering into a shape, to which it yielded as if it had been so much tough wax, and then went on again as if I had not been there.
His kitten was a little more friendly, though, for it ran from the brickwork of the forge, leaped on to a bench behind me, and bounded from that on to my back, and crept to my shoulder, where it could rub its head against my ear.
“Well, Pannell,” I said, “you’ve heard about the cowardly trick done in the shops?”
“Ay, I heered on’t,” he cried, as he battered away at the steel on his anvil.
“Who did it?”