This was a terrible threat for Jack Jaikes, who had brought away from Scotland no particular religion, except (as was common in these years) that unbounded adoration of Mr. Gladstone, which culminated in 1880.
For that night Jack Jaikes made me a shake-down among his own gang, and urged me to get the Chief to let me serve there.
"Man, I could be doing wi' ye fine," he said, "even though ye do not ken one end of a gun from anither till she goes off! But there's a headpiece on ye and they tell me that ye are fair bursting with the mathematics!"
I told him I was better at classics, and he was, I think, more desirous of my company than ever.
"My brither passed for the kirk and was something of a dab at the Greek. You learned yours here in France—will that be the same sort? It will? That's grand. Ye can gie me a bit help, then? I have some o' his auld college buiks in my box. I hae put in heaps o' spadewark at readin' them, but it is a dreary business by yersel'! For ane foot that ye gang forward, ye slip back twa, as the Irishman said aboot the road covered with ice!"
Above my head great steel armatures rose high in the air. The flitting lanterns brought out now the brass knobs of a governor, now the dim glistening bulk of a huge fly-wheel away up near the roof of the shed which Jack Jaikes and his men used as a dormitory. There was one fixed light which shone upon the instrument attached to a little field telegraph. Jack Jaikes had given up his idea of a wholesale electrocution of an attacking force—that is, Dennis Deventer had compelled him to give it up. But he had perfected a kind of burglar alarm applied to a wider area, which completely encircled the works and (separately) protected the Château and its grounds. If anyone interfered with his wires at any point, Jack Jaikes could instantly warn the nearest post to the disturbance, and the men would swarm out like wasps.
The plan had its little inconveniences. Cats in particular loved and were loved upon the great factory wall. But Jack Jaikes devised means, by "stinging them up a bit" electrically, to make them "leave that," as he expressed it.
Rooks also came to perch and left with a whoop of terror, or clung desperately head down with paralysed claws firmly knotted till the men plucked them off and threw them into a corner to recover.
But the first company of the Avengers, tentatively scrambling about the north-west corner to see what sort of watch the English kept, were promptly checked by a dozen bayonets thrust down from above, and having received information, they departed without standing on ceremony.
Let it not be thought that I slept much in the power-house. It was altogether too picturesque and vivid for me. My heart beat with a rousing and incommunicable joy. I was again among my own kind. I had done my best to sympathise with those others over the wall. I had tried to help and understand Keller Bey, but though I might wear the red cardigan, follow Garibaldi, run up the "tatter of scarlet" under Keller Bey's orders, my heart beat with the after-guard. My instincts were "yellow"—the rest was but the rash of the blood which came with youth and would pass like a malady of childhood.