It was a hard, wicked face, blue-jowled and craggy,
with long, obstinate cheeks and inexorable eyes. The brake behind was
full of patrons of the sport-flushed iron-foremen, heads of departments,
managers. One was drinking from a metal flask, and raised it to
Montgomery as he passed; and then the crowd thinned, and the Wilson
cortege with their dragoons swept in at the rear of the others.
The road led away from Croxley, between curving green hills, gashed and
polluted by the searchers for coal and iron. The whole country had been
gutted, and vast piles of refuse and mountains of slag suggested the
mighty chambers which the labour of man had burrowed beneath. On the
left the road curved up to where a huge building, roofless and
dismantled, stood crumbling and forlorn, with the light shining through
the windowless squares.
"That's the old Arrowsmith's factory. That's where the fight is to be,"
said Wilson. "How are you feeling now?"
"Thank you, I was never better in my life," Montgomery answered.
"By Gad, I like your nerve!" said Wilson, who was himself flushed and
uneasy. "You'll give us a fight for our money, come what may.
That place on the right is the office, and that has been set aside as
the dressing and weighing room."
The carriage drove up to it amidst the shouts of the folk upon the
hillside.
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