"Then you wot?" repeated the engineer, bending his brows sternly above a nose swollen to twice its usual size.
"Out with it!" snarled the stoker, whose lip was painful.
"I was afraid as it couldn't be true," stuttered Billy.
The stoker exchanged a look with the engineer.
"The van's burnt, an' we've both lost our property, to say nothin' of our prospects, mate," he said with a sardonic sneer, "but one comfort's left us, Billy's alive!"
A little later the plowing engine with its consort was at work under the hot September sky. As the Powler cultivator traveled to and fro, ripping up the stubbles, the boy who sat on the iron seat and manipulated the guiding-wheel, snivelled gently, realizing that the brief but welcome interval of icy aloofness on the part of his superiors had passed, never to return; and that the injunction of the Prophet would thenceforth be scrupulously obeyed.