Chapter 73

We built a language out of what there was.

The slate was for the dark hours, after the third bell, when the night man had gone up to his pipe. The grate was for everything else. I struck it with the rim of my tin cup, softly, low down where the iron was thickest and the sound went up the shaft and not along the row: once for yes, twice for no, three times for say it again. The two notes, high on the top bar and low on the bottom, for I’m here, and for goodnight, and after a while for a great many things that had no other word.

Rowan learned it in a day and a half and then, without being asked, began to make up his own. He couldn’t strike anything without being seen, so he used what a horse-breaker has. By daylight he whistled to the colts the way he always had, and nobody in the yard thought anything of it; but a long low note on one breath meant the sergeant’s about, and three short ones meant there’s a guard by the shaft, keep still,