He lighted his lantern, and they tramped together down the cleave, following the wire all the way to the river and finding it intact. Presumably it was the waterfall which was not doing its duty.
They returned to their gloomy huts, the one sorrowful, the other angry. "You'm a gurt dafty-headed ole vule! That's what yew be!" cried the angry one, when they reached the top of the cleave.
Peter received this opinion with unwonted humility; and replied as meekly as any Christian martyr: "He be gone wrong somehow. I'll put 'en right to-morrow."
"Put 'en right, will ye?" cried Mary scornfully. "How be I to mix bread' and get supper? You'm a proper old horniwink, and I hopes the dogs 'll have ye."
These curses aroused Peter. He spat upon the ground, and drew mystic figures with his boot between Mary and himself. Having done what he could to avert the evil, he turned upon Mary and threatened her with the lantern. She continued her insults, having lost her temper completely, not so much because Peter had failed in his electrical engineering, as because she had an idea he had been making a fool of her. They were both ignorant, but one did not know it and was brazen, while the other was aware of it and was sensitive. She went on calling him weird names, and hoping the whist hounds would hunt him, until he lost his temper too. They had never quarrelled so violently before, but Peter was helpless in spite of his big threats, for Mary could have tackled and beaten two men as strong as her little brother. When he came to close quarters she picked him up, lantern and all, cuffed him, carried him into her hut, and snatching up her bulging umbrella whacked him well over the head with it.
Peter was immediately overwhelmed, not merely by the umbrella, but with packages which tumbled upon his shoulders, then to the floor, and were revealed to Mary's eyes by the dull gleam of the lantern, which was giving a very different light from that which had been anticipated from what had been the little glass globe hanging from the roof—had been and was not, for Mary had utterly demolished it with an upward sweep of her immense umbrella.
"Lord love us all!" she cried, her good-humour returning at once. "If there hain't the tea, and sugar, and t'other things what I bought to Goosie Vair, and thought the piskies had been and took!"