Down in the Slack lanterns moved, and the confused noise of voices could be heard a mile away. Dark forms, running hither and thither, seemed to interweave with the shadows, while others lay stretched up the hillside or sat squatting on barrows and timbers. For a hundred yards and more the slope of the hill showed the toil of many weeks. Hillocks of earth, sand, clay, stones, a confusion of timbers, barrows, baulks, spades and mattocks, ropes, lime-heaps and what not, littered the border of the Slack. Had you tried to thread your way among these you would have run the risk of walking suddenly into the deep cutting in the hillside that sheltered the furnaces themselves. The larger furnace for smelting was built into the hill; the smaller refining furnace stood cheek by jowl with it, and was barely five feet high. A tripod of heavy beams, that had served its end with the completion of the construction, had not yet been taken down, and a half-made tackle like a heavy capstan, apparently for crushing, seemed to have been abandoned. The smaller of the furnaces was fitted with a pair of bellows in a gibbet-like frame; and fifty yards away, where the Slack turned on itself towards Brotherton Bog, was the older plant--the heavy frames in which the coining-dies were set, to be struck with the sledges. They had blackened their faces with soot or charcoal, as children might who wished to make themselves out desperately wicked, and they leaped and moved with uncouth gestures. As if their native jargon of a dialect had not been enough, they had added to it a harsh and villainous lingo of unmeaning syllables. The furnace fires were laid; half a dozen casks of ale lay near them; and on mats of sacking on the hillside a couple of slaughtered and dressed sheep were ready for the roasting. Mish Murgatroyd had had his hair cut, and where the perspiration had partly washed his brow of its grime his two great calf-licks gleamed oilily in the shifting lantern-light. His brute of a brindled dog was fastened to one of the scaffold-timbers. A man called Leventoes had blacked, not his face only, but his body from the waist up; and Dick o’ Dean had smirched himself, not with black, but with red sheep-ruddle. These two danced here and there, mopping and mowing and talking the lingo incessantly. The youth called Charley seemed to have made himself drunk before coming; and Pim o’ Cuddy, the devil’s clerk now, hopped here and there, boasting gleefully of his own wickedness, and mixing up lingo and responses in an imbecile manner. Two men played singlestick with hammerhafts, making sharp cracks in the night.