Beyond, hills after hills covered with scraggy pine. Half a mile to the south was the railway station, and a spur ran to both mines.
Since the loungers around that station had witnessed the home-coming of young Carrington, conversation had flourished in dialects Cornish and Irish and Swedish and “Dago,” as well as that tongue to which its users alluded proudly as “United States.”
The first comment of all this polyglot assemblage had inclined toward the critical, with emphasis which ran the gamut from the humorous to the snarl, laid on what Mr. Kipley had characterized as “those dum clothes.”
Trevanion, shift boss, coming to the surface that first night, to learn of the child’s peril, heard it in silence and with smoldering eyes; heard it sullenly as he held the child in his arms, and with a surly nod went back to his cottage.
And the long-legged girl who told him resented his silence as a lack of interest not only in the event, but in her narrative.
It was not often that anything so exciting happened. Events were usually underground casualties in Yellow Dog. “’E could ’a’ said ’e was glad the child wasna killed,” she complained to her father.
“’E’d na say what you maun know, onyway,” she got for comfort; for the men admired Trevanion, and trusted him blindly.
They comprehended, too, the way he had taken his trouble, and they left him to himself, since he wished it. It was his way; just as it was his way to read, to study, to get some beginnings of the patiently dug-out education of a dully persistent man.
If he had lost his Cornish accent, save in excitement or in his orders to them, he had not lost his Cornish patience, nor that curious Cornish affinity between man and mine.
What they did not understand was the measure of his fierce love for his child; the child that was to have a chance. This was the mainspring of his life.