Patience Wins: War in the Works

Uncle Bob gave me a sharp look that seemed to go through me, and then strode into the workshop, while I followed him trembling with anger and misery, to think that I should have...

"By no means. Besides, we shall not be busy for a day or two. Have a few hours' fishing, and I daresay one of us will come and see how you are getting on."

"To be sure we do, my lad," he said; "and we'll be ready as we can when we are attacked; but I don't see the necessity for training ourselves to fight."

I can't tell you the horrors of those moments as they appeared to me. No description could paint it all exactly; but one moment I was down in darkness with the current thunderin...

It was dinner-hour, and all the men had gone but Pannell, who was sitting on a piece of iron out in the yard calmly cutting his bread and meat into squares and then masticating...

"Will I come!" I cried, jumping and feeling as if I should like to shout for joy, so delightful seemed the idea of getting away into the hills, and having one of our old walks.

I was wildly excited, and began thinking that we should all be armed with swords and guns, so that I was terribly disappointed when that evening I found Uncle Dick enter the roo...

The next day, after recounting plenty of my adventures to my mother, but, I am afraid, dressing some of them up so that they should not alarm her, a letter reached me from Uncle...

I did not feel ready for my breakfast if it was, especially a breakfast of bread and meat with no chair, no table, no cloth, no tea, coffee, or bread and butter.

Even at leaving time it was as bad, and I found myself in the position that I must either tell one of my uncles what I had done, or leave the trap to take its chance.

I thought when I lay down, after putting out my candle, that I should never get a wink of sleep. There was a dull glow upon my window-blind, and I could hear a distant clangour...

Next morning I went down to the works, feeling as if I had grown in one night a year older, and after giving Piter the bones I always took him down, and receiving the ram-like b...

"Bravo, Spartan!" cried Uncle Bob, as he stood looking on, when, after walking some distance, Uncle Dick insisted upon my taking off my jacket in a lane and having the place bat...

"Better and better!" cried Uncle Dick, waving a letter over his head one morning after the post had come in. "All we have to do is to work away. Our steel is winning its way mor...

One dark night at the end of March we went down to the works all four, meaning to watch two and two through the dark hours. The wind blew hard and the rain fell, and as we reach...

I looked in the direction from which the sounds came, but there was nothing visible, save the thick white fog, and in my excitement and horror, thinking I was looking in the wro...

The dog whined and laid his great jowl in my hand, blinking up at me and trying to make his savage grin seem to be a pleasant smile; but all at once he started away, threw up hi...

The keeping watch of a night had now grown into a regular business habit, and though we discovered nothing, the feeling was always upon us that if we relaxed our watchfulness fo...

Rash--cruel--unwise. Well, I'm afraid it was all those, but I was only a boy, and I was stung by the injustice and cowardly cruelty of the outrages perpetrated on us by the men...

I did not sleep that morning, but kept watch with Uncle Jack, and as soon as the men came to work I hurried off to Mrs Stephenson's to tell the others of the night's adventures.

Every day the works grew more busy, and prosperity seemed to be coming upon us like sunshine. The men worked steadily and well, and the old opposition had apparently died out; b...

No time was lost. The agreements were signed, and Uncle Dick packed up his traps, as he called them, that is to say, his books, clothes, and models and contrivances, so as to go...

The work was started the next morning, and for a fortnight or so everything went on in the smoothest manner possible. The men were quite cheerful and good-tempered, doing their...

We listened, and I laughed as I heard the rattling noise made by a key as if our friend was trying to get in, after which he seemed to realise what had been done, and went away...

Fancy the horrors of that night! The great dam about which one of my uncles had expressed his doubts when we visited it the previous year, and of which he had spoken as our engi...

"What a shame!" I said. "Here are you three great clever men, who know all about it; you've been down half a dozen times, and yet you won't answer a civil question when you are...

As it happened, Mr Tomplin came in that evening, and when he asked how matters were progressing at the works, Uncle Dick looked round and seemed to be asking his brothers whethe...