was a huddle of houses and a small inn. He was hungry, but he did not dare to stop. One way led to Watford, the other to St. Albans. He took a shilling from his new purse and tossed it. It came down heads. St. Albans, then.
A mile farther on he came up with a wagon setting off north with a load of shoring posts. A threepenny piece got him a place up beside the driver. As the wagon jolted along, he thought of his luck again and of poor Billy Blair and of the meekness of the hanged. After a while he slept.
2
Late in the afternoon of the day of that fortunate wayside encounter, a Durham coal miner named James Bordon, who was married to Billy Blair’s sister Nan, was standing near the head of a steep-sided and thickly wooded ravine known locally as the Dene. He was looking in the direction of the sea, which at that distance was no more than a change in the quality of the light, a pale suffusion low in the sky. At his back, little more than half a mile away, was the colliery village of Thorpe, where he lived, though nothing of it could be seen from where he was standing; cottages and surrounding fields belonged to the upper world; here below, vagrant streams, over great spans of time, had gouged through the bolder clay and limestone to make a deep and narrow chasm.
Bordon had not attended any school, and he could not read or write. He was ignorant of this long scooping-out of the rock, the millions of years that had gone into it. But he knew the Dene with a knowledge no study of geology could have given him. He had known it all his life; he had played here as a child, made tree houses with other children, fished for sticklebacks and newts in the beck that ran through the gorge below him, slate gray in color now, under this lowering sky. Childhood had ended for him at the age of seven, when his father, in accordance with the general habit, and as his own father had done, had taken him down to work in the mine. His father was gone now; he had died as a good number of miners did, his lungs choked up with all the years of inhaling flint dust.
Bordon had come here straight from the pit, as he sometimes did—more often nowadays than before, as if from a need that was growing. He was black with coal dust; the acrid smell of it, together with the sweat of his labor, rose to him from the folds of his clothing, thick cotton shirt and trousers, leather waistcoat and apron and knee pads. For fourteen years now he had been a full pitman, a hewer, cutting out the coal from the face. He had worked for ten hours that day, starting at six in the morning, and he had done his stint—he was not paid by the hour but bound by contract to cut coal enough to fill six corves, thirty hundredweight, in one working shift, or suffer loss of wages if he came short of this. The condition met—and the judgment was his—he was free to leave the coal lying for the putters to load into the corves and drag to the pithead.
He stood still now, letting the peace and silence of the place settle around him, and the strange sense of a stronger existence that came with them. He could not easily have found words for this. He was unpracticed in speaking about feelings, and there was no one, in any case, with whom he might have made the attempt, without fear of being thought softheaded. But it was mainly the reason why he came to this place, the sense of intensified life that visited him when he stood alone here. Partly he knew it, though confusedly, for the shelter afforded by the open sky, the removal of a roof too close, the fact that he could raise his head and shift his limbs freely, the steady light after the hours of kneeling with hammer and wedge at the narrow seam, in the close heat, by the variable flame of the candle.
But it was more than this, more than mere awareness of freedom; he felt a gathering of the heart and pulse of his existence, stronger now for the faint sounds that came to him as he stood here, sounds of other existences