“What!” he cried, pincers in one hand, hammer in the other; and he looked as if he were going to seize me with one tool and beat me with the other. “Yah! Get out, you young joker! You know it warn’t me.”
“But you know who did it.”
Pannell looked about him, through the window, out of the door, up the forge chimney, and then he gave me a solemn wink.
“Then why don’t you speak?”
The big smith took a blade of steel from the fire as if it were a flaming sword, and beat it into the reaping-hook of peace before he said in a hoarse whisper:
“Men’s o’ one side, lad—unions. Mesters is t’other side. It’s a feight.”
“But it’s so cowardly, Pannell,” I said.
“Ay, lad, it is,” he cried, banging away. “But I can’t help it. Union says strike, and you hev to strike whether you like it or whether you don’t like it, and clem till it’s over.”
“But it’s such a cowardly way of making war, to do what you men do.”
“What they men do, lad,” he whispered.