For a time they could get no answer, but at last the door was cautiously opened and the head of an old man appeared. How old he was it would have been difficult to say, for though his eyes were rheumy and the irises ringed with the white circles of age, his hair was plentiful and scarcely streaked with gray. He leaned on a stick and did not seem pleased to see them, speaking in a tongue that Abner could scarcely understand. When they told him that Wigan Joe had sent them he became a little more hospitable, but the consciousness of a Wesleyan policeman in the village still prevented him from opening the door to them. The foreman of the water-works job, he said, whose name was Eve, could certainly be found at the Pound House at Mainstone, three miles away over the river. ‘That’s in England,’ he mumbled, as though he were speaking of a barbarous foreign country. As to lodgings he could not help them. On Tuesday the cloggers were coming over from Lesswardine and had arranged to take his two rooms. Mick pressed him, and he admitted that, at a pinch, his wife might be able to put them up until then, provided that they were in a position to pay for a room and food. Abner assured him that that was all right, but he still refused to commit himself till Mrs Malpas returned from chapel. As a favour he allowed them at last to leave their bundles with him while they set off again to find the foreman. They promised to return to Chapel Green in the evening, and before they turned their backs he had closed the door again with evident relief. They reached Mainstone just before the opening of the Pound House. The foreman Eve, whom his associates called Gunner, a little man who wore a shield over the socket from which one of his eyes was missing, told them that they need not want for a job if they meant business and told them to apply to the clerk of the works early on Monday morning. ‘You say Mr Eve sent you and it’ll be all right.’ At the end of this sentence he was snatched away by a power beyond his control, for the doors of the ale-house opened and the twenty or thirty men who had been lounging outside flowed into the bar like metal into a mould. It was a clean and pleasant place surrounded by settles of black Welsh oak. The presence of the navvies from the waterworks had made it into a kind of recognised canteen, and behind the bar were ranged three great barrels of Astill’s ales. Even at a distance of eighty miles from North Bromwich the power of Astill’s influence was felt. Mick, without any difficulty, had already enrolled himself as a member of the company. He had paired off with a big lumbering fellow in corduroys with a red, stupid face and curly hair.