If ever I can, I will." His reply was only to dismiss it with a curt little nod.
But Katie knew that did not necessarily mean that he was feeling curt.
She was drawn back to the open door from which she could see the long double line of men working steadily at the forges.
"What are those men doing ?" she asked.
"Forging one of the parts of a rifle," he replied.
It recalled what the man who mended the boats had said of the saddles: that the first war those saddles would see would be the war over the manufacture of them.

Would he go so far as to say the first use for the rifles--?
Surely not.

He must have been speaking figuratively.
But something in the might of the thing--the long lines of men at work on rifles to be used in a possible war--made the industrial side of it seem more vital and more interesting than the military phase.

This was here.
This was real.

There was practically no military life at the Arsenal--not military life in the sense one found it at the cavalry post.