Patience Wins: War in the Works

by George Manville Fenn

“Poor old boy! Why, you seem as sleepy as I am, Piter!” I said, as I seated myself on the stairs leading up to the office; and he whined softly and laid his head in my lap.

I thought I heard a noise just then, and looked up, but there was no repetition of the sound, and I sat there at a turn of the stairs, leaning against the wall, and wondering why the dog had not started up instead of letting his heavy head drop lower in my lap.

“Why, you are as drowsy as I am, Piter,” I cried again, playing with his ears; “anyone would think you had been taking a sleeping draught or something of that kind.”

He answered with a heavy snore, just like a human being, and I sat gazing down and out through the open doorway into the yard, thinking that it would not be long now before it was broad daylight instead of that half darkness that seemed so strange and misty that I could only just see through the doorway and distinguish the stones.

Then I could hardly see them at all, and then they seemed to disappear, and I could see all over the yard, and the dam and the works all at once. It was a wonderful power of sight that I seemed to possess, for I was looking through the walls of the upper shop, and all through the lower shop, and down into the water-pit. Then I was looking round the furnace, and in at the smiths’ forges, and at the great chimney-shaft, and at the precipice by Dome Tor.

What a place that seemed! Since my uncle slipped over it the slaty, shaley face appeared to have grown twice as big and high, and over it and down the steep slope a man was crawling right in from the Dome Tor slip to our works. I saw him come along the stone edge of the dam and over the wheel with the water, to bob up and down in the black pit like a cork float when an eel is biting at a bait. There he went—bob—bob—bob—and down out of sight.

It seemed such a splendid bite, that, being fond of fishing, I was about to strike, the absurdity of the idea of fishing with a man for a float never striking me for a moment; but, just as I was going to pull up, the man was crawling over the floor of the grinders’ shop, and the water was not there, though the wheel seemed to be going round and uttering a heavy groan at every turn for want of grease.

There he was again, creeping and writhing up the stairs, and higher and higher along the floor among the lathes; then he was in the office, and over the bed where Uncle Bob lay making a snoring noise like the great water-wheel as it turned. What a curiously-long, thin, writhing man he seemed to be as he crawled and wriggled all over the floor and lathes and polishing-wheels. Down, too, into the smiths’ shops, and over the half-extinct fires without burning himself, and all the time the wheel went round with its snoring noise, and the man—who was really a big eel—was ringing a loud bell, and—

I jumped up wide-awake, upsetting Piter, and throwing his head out of my lap, when, instead of springing up, he rolled heavily half-way down the stairs as if he were dead.

“Why, I’ve been to sleep,” I said angrily to myself, “and dreaming all sorts of absurd nonsense! That comes of thinking about fishing for eels.”