“No, no,” I cried. “We arranged to go to bed.”
“You arranged to go to bed, Cob, but I did not. You don’t suppose I could behave so unfairly to my brothers as to neglect the task they placed in my hands.”
He did not say any more. It was quite sufficient. I felt the rebuff, and was thoroughly awake now and ashamed of what I had proposed.
Without a word I took the lantern and held out my hand.
“Good-night, Uncle Jack!” I said.
He had seemed cold and stern just before. Now he was his quiet old self again, and he took my hand, nodded, and said:
“Two o’clock, Cob. Good-night!”
I saw him go along the great workshop, enter the office and close the door, and then I started on my rounds.
It was anything but a cheerful task, that keeping watch over the works during the night, and I liked the first watch from ten to two less than the second watch from two to six, for in the latter you had the day breaking about four o’clock, and then it was light until six.
For, however much one might tell oneself that there was no danger—no likelihood of anything happening, the darkness in places, the faint glow from partly extinct fires, and the curious shadows cast on the whitewashed walls were all disposed to be startling; and, well as I knew the place, I often found myself shrinking as I came suddenly upon some piece of machinery that assumed in the darkness the aspect of some horrible monster about to seize me as I went my rounds.