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The third night after was settled upon as the one to leave, as it promised to be dark and rainy, but just before night, the Sergeant took it into his head to try the floor, and procuring a long pole he went into the room below and punched at the loose boards, which immediately yielded, and then he brought in another carpenter, and personally superintended stopping up the aperture, which was done by spiking pieces of joist, against the floor joists, completely closing it up.
He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of the oats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed low away. The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the second day of famine all seeds being buried first under ice and now under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, the larger following to prey on them.
Her mother, long time a widow, lived in the House of M. de Braguelongne, civil lieutenant of the Chatelet de Paris, whose wife lived with lord of Lignieres, to the great scandal of the period. But everyone then had so many joists in his own eye that he had no right to notice the rafters in the eyes of others.
A silver drinking bowl was set down for each of the kingly guests, and a goblet of beaten gold for the king of Bute. The hall was lighted with many cruse lamps that hung suspended from the oaken joists, and, lest the evening should be chill, there was a fire of fragrant pine logs blazing on the open hearth.
I endeavoured with a glass to see whether notches had been hacked in the schist to receive stays, and others on the ridge to accommodate joists, but could distinguish none. Peyrousse became a Calvinist stronghold in the Wars of Religion, when the churches were destroyed; but the Huguenots made no attempt to climb the Tailor's Rocks and restore the castle.
Coppices of slender columns of thistled globes sprang up to meet the festooned joists. Between the girders they draped themselves in long, stellated garlands; grouped themselves in innumerable, kaleidoscopic patterns. They clicked into place around the golden turret in which we crouched.
Coventry, better informed, darted at once to Little's quarters, and there beheld an awful sight; the roof presented the appearance of a sieve: of the second floor little remained but a few of the joists, and these were most of them broken and stood on and across each other, like a hedgehog's bristles.
It was a grand scene, really inspiring forty or fifty masons on the line, perhaps half as many helpers or mixers, the Italians carrying bricks, and a score of carpenters now arriving under another foreman to set the beams and lay the joists as the walls rose upward.
Up under the joists there was the terrible struggle of a fly in a web, at first more and more violent, then ceasing in a strain so fine that the ear could scarce take it; a bee came in one window, went out another; a rat, sniffing greedily at its hole, crept toward a crumb under a bench, ran back, crept nearer, seized it and was gone; a toiling slate-pencil grated on its way as arduously as a wagon up a hill; he had to teach a beginner its letters.
The engineer did as requested, and Jim slipped the rope's end around one of the log joists and tied it securely. "It will be a good thing to have this fastened here, in case we should have to come back," remarked Jim. "Which I hope we won't until we get something to eat," said Berwick, who was not so young and enthusiastic as to find sufficient food in an adventure as Jim did.
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