‘To finish out your work ain’t no sense,’ Mr. Springett cut in. ‘That’s what I’m always saying to the boy here.’ He nodded towards Dan. ‘That’s what I said when I put the new wheel into Brewster’s Mill in Eighteen hundred Seventy-two. I reckoned I was millwright enough for the job ’thout bringin’ a man from Lunnon. An’ besides, dividin’ work eats up profits, no bounds.’
Hal laughed his beautiful deep laugh, and Mr. Springett joined in till Dan laughed too.
‘You handle your tools, I can see,’ said Mr. Springett. ‘I reckon, if you’re any way like me, you’ve found yourself hindered by those—Guilds, did you call ’em?—Unions, we say.’
‘You may say so!’ Hal pointed to a white scar on his cheek-bone. ‘This is a remembrance from the master watching Foreman of Masons on Magdalen Tower, because, please you, I dared to carve stone without their leave. They said a stone had slipped from the cornice by accident.’
‘I know them accidents. There’s no way to disprove ’em. An’ stones ain’t the only things that slip,’ Mr. Springett grunted. Hal went on:
‘I’ve seen a scaffold-plank keckle and shoot a too-clever workman thirty foot on to the cold chancel floor below. And a rope can break——’
‘Yes, natural as nature; an’ lime’ll fly up in a man’s eyes without any breath o’ wind sometimes,’ said Mr. Springett. ‘But who’s to show ’twasn’t a accident?’
‘Who do these things?’ Dan asked, and straightened his back at the bench as he turned the schooner end-for-end in the vice to get at her counter.
‘Them which don’t wish other men to work no better nor quicker than they do,’ growled Mr. Springett. ‘Don’t pinch her so hard in the vice, Mus’ Dan. Put a piece o’ rag in the jaws, or you’ll bruise her. More than that’—he turned towards Hal—‘if a man has his private spite laid up against you, the Unions give him his excuse for working it off.’
‘Well I know it,’ said Hal.