The fuel was dry as tinder, and the furnaces began to roar side by side. The semicircle broke up, and the moans and concerted calls became a chaos of noise. A man drove in the bung of a cask of ale, and from the shallow tin bowl that he filled three or four strove to drink at once, spilling the liquor over their bodies. They were fixing hooks into the carcases, and already from the orifice of the larger furnace flickerings of flame had begun to stream upwards. Monjoy tugged at his whiskers, regarding this. “We can’t avoid a glow,” he muttered, “but we don’t want a conflagration. I’ll build a high hood of earth....” He climbed to the brink of the cutting and stood in thought. Already the furnaces stood in a clear red light, and it was becoming hot.
Many had now stripped off their coats and shirts, and gleaming ribs and shoulders, black faces and hairy chests, flitted and mingled in the red glare fantastically. The first cask of ale was finished, and as they became drunk each man vented his joy in the howl that liked him best. The counterchange of ruddy light on leaping bodies was restless; shadows streamed away into the darkness; and men wreathed their arms about one another, and danced and wrestled as the fires burned furiously. Some were for setting the carcases on to roast at once; but Mish Murgatroyd barred the furnace door with a crowbar, seized a man who approached it in his sinewy arms, and they rolled over together in black moulder’s sand, while Mish gnashed his teeth, for all it was but horseplay. Monjoy, looking down on them from the edge of the cutting, murmured, “Satan himself won’t be able to hold them in an hour.”
Somebody touched him on the shoulder. He turned, and saw James Eastwood. Surprised, he fell a pace back.
“Why, I didn’t think this mumming was much to your taste,” he said, and Eastwood drew him by the shirt sleeve.
“Come where we can talk,” he said; “I’ve come to see you.”
They passed above the furnaces, and descended the hill where the Slack turns towards Brotherton Bog. They put the shoulder of the hill between themselves and the hubbub, and the moon, at its last quarter, appeared low over the moor, and showed the little creeping miasmic vapours that curled over the surface of the dark morass. Again Eastwood took Monjoy’s sleeve.
“Tell me where Ellah is,” he said abruptly.
“Eh?” said Monjoy. “You didn’t expect to find him here, did you?”
“Don’t waste words. He left the ‘Fullers’ two days ago, and he isn’t in Wadsworth.”
Monjoy’s arms were folded and his fingers were moving lightly on his big biceps. They were suddenly arrested in their movement, and his brow tightened suddenly into a concentrated knot.