Ebba Crane hauled stone at the Thornwick quarry with a gang of sixty, and the gang was counted by number, not by name. The clerks at the quarry-head had a book with sixty lines in it, one for each hauler, and a number beside each line, and every morning the clerk came down the cutting with the book under his arm and read the numbers out to the gang in a flat tired voice, one after another, so that each hauler could answer to his figure. Ebba answered to thirty-one. She had answered to thirty-one since the first week, when the clerk had written her in, and she had answered to it in the same flat tone every morning since, because a number was a thing you could say without giving anything away.
That morning the clerk came down the cutting, and read the numbers, and got to thirty-one, and went past it.
He did not stop. He read thirty and then thirty-two and went on along the cutting to thirty-three, and Ebba stood at her block with the hauling-rope round her shoulders and her hands raw on the wet cord, and waited for him to come back. He did not come back. She saw him stop at the cutting’s far end, where the gang’s women and children waited in a line for their shares, and open the book again on his arm, and frown at a page she could not see.
