“Then you’d better not go back on me when your father—which is your father, Kiliat?”
They were two stocky bull-necked men who stumbled over the heat-hazed shingle. From top hat to patent leathers they wore the gear of town life, and both were panting and purple with the labour. Ormond jerked his trousers higher through the belt strap, and straightened the shoulders under the loose shirt. His whole body was alive with fight. He had risked much in bringing directors up here; but all the rotten length of the Lion had called him dumbly once too often. He waited for Kiliat’s casual introductions; said just one thing in his throat when the boy slid down into the paddock where Gordon was working the second jet, and met the two promptly.
“I am very pleased to see you,” he said. “You would like to look over the plant, of course? And I presume that you got my letter?”
The other man—Ormond knew him for the chief of the directors—stared at the sullen network of pipes; at Ormond’s one-roomed whare behind the tin power-house; at white-faced Roddy shovelling the wash at the box tail.
“My soul!” he said. “What a place! What a ghastly place to live in!”
Ormond had lived on the Changing Creek seven years. He had shot rabbits in every shingle gully that fed it, from the penstock
