The pessimist with the sieve laughed with the superiority of youth, and of a reader of the Daily Independent.
“There’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place,” went on the same speaker, “me father knew that well—sure the bog itsel’ is only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen that’s sixty feet deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them. ’Tis out undher Tully that wather goes. Sure there was a man had a grand heifer—God knows ye’d sooner be lookin’ at her than atin’ yer dinner—she fell down in one o’ them holes, and went away undher the ground with the wather. As sure as I’m alive, they heard her screeching up through the bog!”
The reader of the Independent was half-staggered, and the ganger, who had advanced upon the party with the quietness of a dangerous bull, here broke upon the conversation in gross and fervid oratory.
“They’re gettin’ it in style down there,” said one of the platform party. “By damn, if he comes to talkin’ to me, I’ll throw down the shovel and ax him where is me three weeks’ wages!”
“Maybe ye will, Mortheen,” rejoined his next-door neighbour, “an’ maybe this time next week ye’ll be afther him axing him to take ye back.”
“Is it him?” replied the undaunted Mortheen; “little I’d think of breaking his snout for him, or Glasgow’s ayther!”
As he spoke, the whistle of an engine, thinned by distance, made itself heard, and away on the horizon the steam cloud blossomed like a silver flower against the sunny sky.
When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station, Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the dinner-hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds, and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step.
Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by a fire of chips and bits of plank. A luncheon-basket stood on a carpenter’s bench, a champagne-bottle on the window-sill, and Lady Susan and Slaney were sitting on boxes by the fire, eating game pie. Lady Susan had violets in her toque, and possessed more strikingly than usual that air of being very handsome that is not always given to handsome people. Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a myriad sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the grey and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host.
“How far do you want us to walk?” she said, looking over her shoulder at the view, “all the way to that wood there? How silly of you to say the bikes would be no use!”