This evening, however, in the presence of so many respectable citizens, the boys stood with hunched-up shoulders and hands in their pockets, silent, or speaking only in whispers. Now and again they nudged one another, like owls on a beam in the church tower.
The fire was being fed properly now, with coal, sending out a cloud of smoke like a waving velvet banner. There was a rasp of filing and sharp strokes of a hammer; the sound of iron against iron. Then down came a compositor boy with the editor’s compliments, and....
“You can tell him I guarantee the machine will work all right. I guarantee it—you understand. And....”
“Then it hasn’t gone yet?”
“But you can see for yourself,” cried Egholm in despair; “the pressure’s there all right now.” And, to prove it, he sprang up and pulled at the little steam whistle. It gave a shriek as if to call for help—then died away.
“Hark at the cock-crow!” shouted Sivert, beside himself. “The world-famous cock crowing.”
“What’s that he’s shouting about?”
No one had understood the words. But they saw the boy dancing on the crest of a hill with his white curls whirling about his head, and the enthusiasm laid hold on them, too. They leaped up from their mounds of seaweed, and in the dusk it seemed to them as if the boat moved. There was a tickling in their throats. Vang was weeping copiously already.
“Give him a cheer,” said the doctor, moving from group to group. The doctor with his glasses was not to be contradicted.