'But eighteen dollars is nawt much to t'mill,' said Adam, humbly; 'doan' be hard, an' gev me a chance, a chance to help mysel'! T'winter's hard, an' I've a family!'
'Did I make your family? You should have thought of that long ago. Stand out of the way, if you're done.'
The stoker clung to the doorpost.
'Summut else I could do—there must be summut—ye knaw summut else, Mr. Cowles?'
'Something else to do, you fool! What could you do—run the engine? tend the planers? If I wanted you at all, I should keep you where you were.'
He moved off at this. Adam seated himself on the familiar cinder heaps and grieved in his simple way, for a time feeling almost bitter.
Little Nobby's deformity was one of the strange things that made Adam think. Several years before, he had the child with him at the factory one night, just old enough to walk a little. In Adam's momentary absence the boy managed to get upon a box near one of the furnace doors, and, rolling against the blistering iron, was horribly burned; yet unaccountably he did not die, but grew bent into a scarred, shapeless body, though his face was a sweet, childish one, innocent of fire. Nobby, as Adam called him after that, was a silent preacher to the stoker. When a clergyman asked him once if he was a Christian, he pointed to Nobby's back:
'I knaw there's a Lord,' he said,' or else Nobby'd died, burnt so sore thet way; an' I knaw He's good, or Nobby'd been a fool a'terward, like children thet burn theirsel's. Saved Nobby from dyin' an' from bein' worse nor dead, both, Lord meant him good.'
The boy was Adam Craig's grandson. His firstborn, Tom, was wild, and went to sea—the old story—leaving wife and unborn child for his father to look to. Six years had gone—the seventh began at New Year's; the boy was born, burnt, saved alive, and not idiotic; its mother had died; Adam's life was outrunning the child's, and he would soon have to leave it to go on by itself; but his faith in his son's return never shook.
'Him'll come back,' he would say, simply, and in perfect confidence, 'I knaw't well. Lord never burnt Nobby for nawt. Him's nawt dead; him'll come back some time, I knaw.'