And big consumptive John Pritchard rarely said a word about that onward-creeping snail that left its double thread of permanent track behind it, but he thought exaltedly and powerfully. Stories had already reached him of drunkenness at Railhead, and fights, and singing at nights, and other godless orgies, and his brow was sternly set. When he preached at the Baptist Chapel about such as loved darkness and the evil paths in which they walked, it was known that he was thinking of Railhead. Men were now plotting their levels almost within sight of Llanyglo. They turned their surveying instruments on the hamlet as if they had been guns, and laid out their chains as if they had been enslaving the soil itself. Then an advance gang approached, and, even while John knew that the end was near (but not so near as all that), that end came. Eight men marched one evening into Llanyglo, bawling a bawdy chorus, with Sam Kerr showing the way. They had bottles and piggins and stone jars of beer, and, slung with joined-up leather belts between two of them, swung a barrel. They stumbled through the loose sand towards the Hafod Unos, hiccoughing and polluting the peaceful evening. Ned Kerr had evidently been advised of their coming; he stood at the door of the Hafod to receive them; and the carousing began.... It lasted half the night, and then each clay-stained navvy and tattooed platelayer slept and snored where he fell. John Pritchard did not sleep. Faintly he could hear their singing where he lay. The red and white of the Trwyn light dyed the darkness overhead. John remembered his own words: "It is a den of li-ons——"
Something had already come to Llanyglo.
II
THE CLERK OF THE WORKS
John Willie Garden was by this time at the age when he occasionally washed himself without being told. This he probably did, not out of any great love of cleanliness, but because by washing unbidden he acquired the right to retort, when the order to wash came, "I have—there!" Did one of the maids give the order he might add the word "Sucks!" This word he withheld when the command came from his mother.
He was still at school at Pannal, but ardently longed to leave. It was intended that sooner or later he should go into business with his father, and during the past Christmas vacation, which the Gardens had spent at home in Manchester, he had had the run of the offices and spinning-sheds. His real education, as distinct from his scholastic one, had been immensely advanced thereby. This real advance had taken place principally after working hours. In such cases there is usually a young clerk or market-man ready to take the son of the firm into his charge, and a certain Jack Webster had had the bringing of John Willie out. This he had done at football matches, in the dressing-rooms where the titans clad themselves for the fray, and at their sing-songs and smokers afterwards. Therefore, John Willie esteemed himself a boy of the world, and already the day seemed far distant when he had shot the Llanyglo rabbits with his bow and arrow, and had buried a sixpence beneath the date-stone of his father's house.
To Llanyglo John Willie went again that summer, as the snail crept forward yard by yard to Abercelyn and the manganese.
All things considered, you might have been pardoned had you supposed that, without John Willie, the work at Railhead must have come to a stop. Had you wished to know anything about that railway—its cost per mile, its contractors' time-limits and penalties, its wages bills, its estimated upkeep—you would have gone, not to those men who spent week-ends at Edward Garden's house, but to John Willie. Railhead was now to him what the building of the Llanyglo house had formerly been, and the fence-burning, and rugby football, and many another interest of the days when he had been a kid and immature. It was in the summer of 1884 that the snail's antennæ approached within sight of Llanyglo, and, rain or shine, permitted or forbidden, John Willie spent most of his waking hours among the masons and smiths and navvies and plate-layers who formed the population of that nomad town of wood and earth and sleepers and rolling stock and escaping steam and corrugated iron. He knew half the men by name. He joined them at dinner when the great buzzer told half a county that it was half-past twelve. He knitted his brows over the curling and thumb-marked plans in the foremen's cabins. He passed this section of work or that, and gave the other his imprimatur. He adapted his stride to the distance between sleeper and sleeper. He spat reflectively on heaps of clay and mortar. With his hands, not in his pockets, but thrust (in imitation of the labourers with the "drop-front" corduroys) deep into his waist-band, and his cap on the back of his yellow, thistle-down head, he gave off-hand nods of greeting and warning "Steadys." He was variously known as "t' gaffer," "t' ganger," "t' clerk o' t' works," and "t' foreman."
And his friend, Percy Briggs, of Pannal School and Roundhay (where his father was an architect) accompanied him. Percy's father was one of Edward Garden's week-enders. He was making the plans of a second house, not far from where Terry Armfield's Thelemites were to have descended the shallow, marble steps to the golden shore. There was also some talk of an hotel.