must, but by this time he was serious, dead serious, on one of his queer hobby-horses, almost all of which consisted in finding the good to be said for anything which was being denounced publicly and loudly, and in some cases with suspicious facility, by the majority of other people. He leaned across the table and spread his lean, nervous hand under Charles’s eyes. “Look! I know it looks like hell, I know it makes a positive wilderness while it lasts, I know it’s the fashion, almost the rule, to damn it out of hand. I know it
“Twenty acres is twenty acres,” said Charles obstinately. “And they want the whole of the preserve, as well.”
“Oh, don’t let’s pretend that’s of any great value! You and your old man like to play with a little shooting there yourselves, but that’s all there is to it. The woods there are pretty enough to look at, but it isn’t a case of valuable timber or loss of soil. I bet you that land could be pasture at the most three seasons after it was relaid—I could show you land that was bearing a pretty good grass the second year after—and that’s what it’s never done in my lifetime or yours.”
“I very much doubt it. And anyhow, it’s an asset as it is— it’s woodland.”
“Private woodland, about half of it, with your fence round it, and not so hot at that. Come off it, Charles!”
“As much an asset, at any rate, as two hundred thousand tons of rubbish at an uneconomic price.”
“But the plant’s here, the labor’s here, it’s a continuation of the very job they’re doing, and if you let them carry on you’ll be bringing the price down, and handsomely. That’s the point!”
“Never within miles of the cost by the old way,” said Charles positively and truthfully; for his grandfather had been in the dog-hole colliery business in the later stages of Comerford’s shallow-mining past.
“Are you seriously holding up the old way as a present-day possibility? As an alternative to surface mining?” Chad really looked startled, as if his friend had proposed a return to the stagecoach; so much startled that Charles colored a little, his broad, florid face burning brick-red under the dark, pained stare. But he felt the weight of listening opinion in the snug to be on his side, and answered sturdily:
“Why not? It got the coal out, didn’t it? Not that we need, in my opinion, to get such poor stuff as this out at all!”
“But it’s there, and the odds are it will be wanted out at some time. And it may as well be while the site here is open— clear the whole lot, and let’s have the ground back in service— whether in two years or ten, at least once for all. If you win your appeal, and they re-lay this site and go away, sooner or later that shallow coal left under your ground is going to be wanted. Supplies aren’t so inexhaustible that we can suppose any deposit of two hundred thousand tons can be ignored forever. Then how do you propose to get it out? Shallow shafts?—like last century?”
“Why not?” said Charles defiantly. “It was effective, wasn’t it?”
Words failed Chad for a moment to express the deadly effectiveness of uncontrolled shallow mining in Comerford. He leaned back with a gusty sigh, and reached for his beer. Io, watching them from the doorway as she went out with a tray, thought them unusually placid tonight, but did not suspect that for the moment she was forgotten. Her reactions if she had suspected it, however, would have been simple relief, only very faintly tinged with pique.
“Shallow mining,” said Chad, carefully quiet as always when he wanted his own prejudices to stop overweighting his case and erecting Charles’s defenses against him, “has done more damage to this district than any other kind of exploitation. Just at the back of the Harrow—off your land—there’s a perfect example, that little triangular field where all those experimental shafts were sunk when we were kids. You know it. Could you even put sheep on that field?”
“No,” admitted Charles, after a moment of grudged but honest consideration. “I suppose you couldn’t. Anyhow,
“No, and if you did you’d lose half of them. It’s pitted all over. They’ve had to wire off the path and take it round the two hedges instead of straight across, for fear of losing somebody down one of the holes; and even under the hedge the path’s cracking and sliding away. Until that ground’s finished subsiding it’s done being used for anything. And that may be for good, it’s certainly several lifetimes. You can’t even hurry the process. If you put heavy machinery on that ground to try to iron it out, you’d simply lose your machines. But it could be stripped and opencast, and at least you’d have some sort of usable land again.”
“But that’s a very extreme case,” objected Charles. “It’s hardly fair to judge by one small field that’s been ruined. The rest of the shafts round the district are fairly scattered.”
“Pretty thickly! Do you know there are at least fifty on your own land?”
They were warming again to enmity, perhaps because Io’s blue dress filled the corners of their eyes, and Io’s small, rounded and pleasing voice was saying something gay and unintelligible to a group of colliers just within earshot.
“Candidly, I don’t believe it,” said Charles, jutting his square brown jaw belligerently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?”
“I’m as likely to know as you, but no, I don’t know the exact figure. And neither do you! But I don’t believe there are anything like fifty!”
“All right, let’s prove it! One way or the other! Come round with me on Saturday afternoon, and I’ll show you shafts you didn’t know were there.”
“It’s likely, isn’t it?” said Charles, jeering. “I’ve been going around with my eyes closed all this time, I suppose?”
“I suppose so, too.”
“My God, I never saw such infernal assurance!” spluttered Charles.
“Well, come and see! What have you got to lose?”
