NEXT morning Abner went with George Malpas to interview the clerk of the works, who engaged him as a labourer at twenty-two shillings a week off-hand. This man had been as long on the waterworks job as Gunner Eve himself. Year after year he had led a nomadic life moving from one point to another of the great pipe line that stretches from the valley of the Dulas Fechen to the reservoirs above Halesby. The piece of work on which Abner and his friends were now engaged was no more than the result of one of the last feeble struggles of the gods of stone against their iron masters. In this part of its course the pipeline, crossing the swollen head waters of the Teme, had been lodged upon a deposit of old red sandstone, a rock that was easily worked and lent itself to Barradale’s plans. A hidden leak, caused possibly by some obscure subsidence, had distorted its bedding. Two unsuccessful attempts had been made to deal with it, and now the engineers had decreed that the whole track must be deflected northwards for half a mile on to a shelf of harder Silurian stone. The scene of these new workings was placed at the mouth of the valley, some three miles below Wolfpits and immediately under the shadow of two hill bastions: the high peak which culminated in the earthwork known as Castel Ditches and a wide hog’s back known as Callow hill. Hither, in the early morning, Abner and George Malpas would set out together carrying the packets of fried bacon sandwiches with which Mary supplied them overnight. Spider, eager to follow them, would watch them go, quivering with anxiety; but George Malpas had lately taken a dislike to the dog and would curse her if she moved a step in their direction, throwing a stone that made her scamper back into the garden. These morning walks were very pleasant to Abner, and pleasant too was the sudden change from a green solitude to the sight of working men who swarmed in the cutting beneath their feet. A trolley way, crowded with iron trucks that were reddened by rust and by the sandstone of the Dulas valley from which they had come, cut through the workings, and beside it ran a deep trough cut ready to receive the black iron pipes that were dumped along its edge. Most of the workers were old hands at the game, but there remained a certain amount of rough digging labour for which Abner’s strength and his experience in the colliery made him suitable. This was allotted to him by the foreman on the first day of his employment. He looked eagerly for Mick Connor, who soon showed himself and appeared none the worse for the debauch in which he and Curly Atwell, the huge west-countryman, had engaged. He declared he was seven pounds better for it, expressing himself as usual in terms of the race-course, but Abner saw from the first that their travelling acquaintance was really at an end.