GERMINAL
observation. His voice trembled, and when he had reached the end they all continued to gaze steadily at the placard. The old miner and the young one looked as though they expected something more; then they went away with depressed shoulders.
"Good God!" muttered Maheu.
He and his companions sat down absorbed, with lowered heads, and while files of men continued to pass before the yellow paper they made calculations. Were they being made fun of? They could never make up with the timbering for the ten centimes taken off the tram. At most they could only get to eight centimes, so the Company would be robbing them of two centimes, without counting the time taken by careful work. This, then, was what this disguised lowering of wages really came to. The Company was economising out of the miners' pockets.
"Good Lord! Good Lord!" repeated Maheu, raising his head. "We should be bloody fools if we took that."
But the wicket being free they came up to be paid. The heads only of the workings presented themselves at the desk and then divided the money between their men to save time. "Maheu and associates," said the clerk, "Filonnière seam, cutting No. 7."
He searched through the lists which were prepared from the inspection of the tickets on which the captains stated every day for each yard the number of trams extracted. Then he repeated:
"Maheu and associated, Filonnière seam, cutting No. 7. One hundred and thirty-five francs."
The cashier paid.
"Beg pardon, sir," stammered the pikeman in surprise. "Are you sure you have not made a mistake?"
He looked at this small sum of money without picking it up, frozen by a shudder which went to his heart. It was true he was expecting bad payment, but it could not come to so little or he must have calculated wrong. When he had given their shares to Zacharie, Étienne and the other mate who replaced Chaval, there would remain at most fifty francs for himself, his father, Catherine and Jeanlin.
"No, no, I've made no mistake," replied the clerk. "There
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