Emrys Vaughan was thirteen, and he was the second son of a man who held for the lower line of the Grip and had never once been to the top of his own town. He was at the top of it. The class went up on Thursday, the wind got up in the night to thirty-three knots and shut the Grip, and on Friday morning Emrys was going down at four. He wanted to know what it cost him.

The Friday lesson was the hour, and Miss Marner gave it at the top, and thirty-one children wrote the hour down. Emrys wrote two. One was the clock. The other was the hour the clock was measured by, which was the same hour for everybody on the moor and not the same hour for anybody in a pit four hundred and ten feet below. The cable ran one mile and a quarter over twenty-two trestles, and the whole of Wyver Hold was hung on the two ends of it. So the car they would go down in at four o’clock would be paid for by somebody standing in an iron pan in the dark.

The first sum was weight, and weight went quickly. An empty grip car was a hundred and forty-four stone. Gwilym Ore had said so on Thursday with his hand flat on the pressed steel of it, and had said there were six ounces of rust on her that were not in the figure, and Emrys had written it all down.

A pan with a man in it was a hundred and fifty-eight stone: four for the pan, a hundred and forty-two of water, and twelve for the man. A hundred and fifty-eight less a hundred and forty-four was fourteen, which was one adult and the two stone margin. The class would go down in two cars, sixteen in one and fifteen in the other. He reckoned the sixteen at an average of nine stone, which was Miss Pugh’s weight, and he knew better than the rest of them.

So that car was two hundred and eighty-eight, and it wanted three hundred and two in the pans against it, and two pans were three hundred and sixteen. There was fourteen stone over. The other car was a hundred and thirty-five of people, so two hundred and seventy-nine, so two hundred and ninety-three wanted, and twenty-three stone over on that one.

And then he saw that he had done the sum for the wrong question. The car was not going to run for him. It was going to run at four o’clock for thirty-one people who were going home, and the man in the pan would stand there either way. Weight was no use at all. The thing that cost was the hour.

An hour was the whole of what a man gave. He stood in a pan for an hour and it took the hour out of him, and there was no coin in it anywhere, and the winding house kept no half hours. The cable took fourteen minutes from the lower landing to the top, and four journeys fitted in an hour, with four minutes over. The class was going down in two. So two of the four, and half of an hour, standing.

Half an hour was thirty minutes. Thirty minutes was eighteen hundred seconds. And there were thirty-one people to divide it between. Eighteen hundred seconds into thirty-one is fifty-eight seconds each, and two seconds over. Thirty-one times fifty-eight was seventeen hundred and ninety-eight. And eighteen hundred less seventeen hundred and ninety-eight was two. There were two seconds of that hour that belonged to nobody at all.

Miss Marner had been standing behind him for some time. She did not interrupt him, because her method was to ask a thing and then wait for it. “What is your name for?” she said. “Eighteen hundred seconds,” said Emrys. “Into thirty-one. Fifty-eight seconds each, and two over.” “That is what your going down costs. What does it cost?” “Nothing. Nobody can sell me fifty-eight seconds. The smallest thing that house has ever taken is an hour, and an hour is not fifty-eight seconds.”

“So a man stands an hour in a pan so that you can go down for a piece of four minutes.” “Yes.” “And who is that man?” “He has to give it,” said Emrys. “It can’t be taken. That is the rule.”

The hour had to come from somebody. Not from the school, which was not on the line. Not from the town, which was not a person, and a thing that is not a person has never spoken one sentence with its own name in it. It could not come from his father. His father had spoken on the third of March, four days ago, in the balance room, with the grip-man hearing him. One name, once a year, for the line a man lives on, and it had his father’s name in it and no other name’s.

The year had three hundred and sixty-five days in it, and the third of March was the sixty-second, and there were three hundred and three days left in which his father could not speak again. And if he spoke again it would not be consent, in a book that knew, on a cable that knew. A name in the book that had not been said was a forgery, and a forgery holds nobody up.

And the trestle path was shut for twenty-five of the three hundred and three, with frost still in the switchbacks, and would not open until the twenty-eighth of March. Which left him two hundred and seventy-eight days of walking four miles in the wet, or an hour of somebody’s standing. So his father’s hour was not one hour. It was the whole of the year. And not one part of it could be paid back, because his father had not given him a thing to pay.

And that left him, which was the sum he had been not doing since Thursday. He could hold. He lived on the lower line. The house was on it and his father worked it, and a boy lives where his father lives. He had the line. He had the sentence, because he had said it out loud to himself about forty times that week. What he did not have was the pan.

There was a list of the people permitted to stand in one, kept in the office with the book, and the youngest name on it was Nell Cardew’s, and she was sixteen, and there were nine under hers. He was thirteen. Sixteen less thirteen was three. And a man on the lower line was counted at twelve stone, because twelve stone was what the first rule was written in. Emrys weighed seven stone. Twelve less seven was five.

Five stone and three years, and a line he had, and a year he had, and a sentence he had, and not one number in the whole of it would move.

At four the wind came off the moor with the mist flat on it, and Ivo Trant’s forecast went up the line from the mast, where the lamp was lit by hand. Twenty-six at the mast, she’ll hold. She’ll be shut at six. Which meant thirty-one of them had to be down by five, and the path was shut, and that was the end of the argument before it started. Emrys stood in the second car with the brake cold under his boots and did the last sum in his head, because you cannot work a slate in that wind.

The two cars took an hour of somebody’s standing between them, and it could not be half of it, because there is no half of it. Thirty-one of him into that hour gave fifty-eight seconds and two over, and the two were nobody’s, and would be nobody’s after he had said his name out loud. Which was the whole of what he had, and the sum of what he had was zero, and a zero does not go in a pan.

The car came in at the lower landing at ten past four and the brake sat down on it and stayed sitting. Emrys got his slate out from under the bench and wrote the sentence on it, and it came out the way it had come out forty times. He did not say it. The cable had been moving, and a name said while the cable is moving does nothing at all. What he had written was a piece of pencil on a slate, worth exactly what the two seconds were worth. He put the slate inside his coat and went out into the wet.

The balance room was cold and lit by one lamp, and the floor was worn into a curve by eleven thousand pairs of boots, and on the curve stood a man with a red woollen mitten on his left hand and nothing on the right. “Down at four ten,” said Ivo Trant. “Gusting twenty-six at the mast, and it’s come to twenty-nine since. She held four minutes over.” Nobody had asked him how long the descent had taken.

Then he looked at the boy, and then at the slate coming out of the boy’s coat, and he said, “You’ll not be standing in one of those.” “No,” said Emrys. “No,” said Ivo Trant. “Nobody in this room has the standing to ask you. Rule two says given and not taken, and in thirty-one years on this drum I have never once made a man get into a pan, and that is not because I am soft. The law does not put a hand on anybody.” “Then that is all right,” said Emrys. “Nobody has asked me.” “That is the whole of it,” said Ivo Trant, and went back to his brake.

“Twenty-three stone over on a loaded car,” said Gwilym Ore, from the drum room doorway. “You have the car light and the water heavy, and nobody has ever weighed the water.” “It is inside the margin,” said Emrys.

Then Bronwen Vasey came out of the office with a tin tube under her arm. She audits the line on a Friday, and she had come down to see what a storm did to the figures. She had heard the whole of it from the doorway, and she held out her hand for the slate. She read it standing up, with the spectacles on their cord and not over her eyes, and read it twice. “Thirty-one into eighteen hundred,” she said. “You have fifty-eight and two over.” “Yes.”

“I cannot tell you that is exact. I have audited this line eleven times and cannot state a figure as exact. Two stone on a car, that is the margin, and everything in this building lives inside it and calls it a measurement.” “Mine is inside the margin.”

“Mine is, and yours is, and so is Gwilym’s six ounces of rust,” said Bronwen Vasey. “That is the whole difficulty. There is an accountant in Barmouth with a machine that adds, and he has never seen a cable, and he could tell you to half an ounce whether the hundred and forty-four holds.” “Then send him mine.” “I will send him yours,” said Bronwen Vasey. “Not the book. The slate. And when he writes that your figures are out by half an ounce in a hundred and forty-four stone, I intend to frame it.”

Outside the millpond gate his father was waiting with the hand lamp, because he had heard the drum stop and knew the hour of it. “I went down,” said Emrys. His father did not ask what time, or how fast, or what the wind had done at the mast. “The sum came out the same,” he said. “What sum?”

“The one you did all afternoon on that slate. It comes out the same for everybody. There is no cheap side to this hill and no dear side. You get one and not the other, and the day you meet somebody who has had both is the day somebody has been lying.” He lifted the lamp clear of the wet. “I have stood in that pan since I was seventeen,” he said. “You never have. I have never once been sorry, and I have never once said so out loud, and now I have.” Emrys walked up the hill with a stub of pencil in his fist and a number in his head that would not go down to zero, and two seconds over.