“Come to something, Arthur,” Eastwood interposed.
“By and by.—Lead has been found hereabouts, and some of it’s been shipped to Holland, and worked over again, and a tithe of it lost in the working, but a profit made even then. How, think you?” He advanced his chin along the table, flipped away the crown-piece, and quietly pronounced the word “Silver.”
By and by he continued.
“I’ve had a busyish winter in that garret over your warehouse, Matthew. This is our first meeting since last November, and perhaps I’m over-shooting myself a little. Never mind. At Rimington in Craven, and on Brunghill Moor in Craven, they’ve had it. Lead ore it is, and a test-master has assayed it (Basby, they called him), and it worked out at sixty pounds more or less to the ton.”
“In Craven,” observed Matthew Moon, drily.
“Well, I’ve been to see it,” Monjoy retorted; “but let me finish. Here, alum and coal we know about. For iron, Holdsworth Dyke is red as a haw with canker-water any day you care to go and look. Noon Nick stones, they’re pure pyrites. Kick up the heather, and all Back o’ th’ Mooin’s red and blue and grey with mineral. Whether it would pay’s another matter; the Dutchmen made it pay.”
“It were me closed up th’ last bellpit,” John Raikes remarked; “go on, Arthur; it’s grand hearing.”
“Very well; and you’ll laugh at this; Matthew will, because it isn’t business-like. What else d’you think I’ve studied this winter? Why, a ballad-book. Hugh Pudsay’s ballad. You’ve heard of Pudsay’s cockleshell-shillings (when you were dandled, maybe), and so had I; but I thought twice. I’m not talking now of his making silver dilly-spoons and selling them for a shilling, and then waking up to it that he might just as well make the shilling. Perhaps he didn’t work a silver mine without patent, and get tripped by some Cope or other, and set off on horse-back for London to save his neck. Perhaps that’s only a song about his getting patent and pardon and meeting the exciseman coming in ten minutes after the fair. But that cockleshell he stamped his shillings with—follow me—it was an escallop, and a mint-mark for that very year of Elizabeth. D’you take me?”
James Eastwood was tilted back in his chair, watching the intersecting rings of light on the ceiling; he let the chair slowly down.
“D’ye mean, Arthur, you’d mine Back o’ th’ Mooin on th’ chance o’ finding silver?”