John Fellows rarely returned home until half an hour after closing time, and for this reason it was seldom that he saw Abner off the football field. At home he never approached him except with the hope of extracting inside information as to the probable results of the league matches on which he proposed to bet, and in this he found Abner unsympathetic, for although league football had not sunk in those days to its present depths of unabashed commercialism, Abner knew that the result of a match was sometimes decided in accordance with the bookmaker’s instructions. John Fellows never backed horses, for he regarded the turf as a resort of crooks and sharks. He put his money on dogs and football teams, and even if he lost it he had at any rate the satisfaction of seeing it lost with his own eyes. He didn’t mind losing money as long as he had a run for it. According to his lights he was a sportsman. The football season had opened with a flourish as far as Mawne United were concerned. In the North Bromwich league they had beaten all their principal rivals, Wolverbury, Dulston, and even the Albion Reserves. Now, in the semi-final of the Midland Cup they were to meet the Albion again. The members of the team became more than ever popular heroes, and Abner, down at the works, was conscious of his share in the distinction. The winter had set in early with a November of black frost that made the scrap-iron with which he was still engaged under the same grumbling foreman harder and more icy to the touch, and congealed the grease in the running guide-wheels of the trolley railway. It was some compensation that the blast furnaces, which were surrounded in summer by a zone of air undulant with intolerable heat, now gave a sense of neighbourly warmth to the centre of the works. Abner, who knew that his position was more secure than ever, managed to spend most of his day near these black towers, talking football to the men who were engaged in making the moulds of sand into which the molten metal would flow when the furnaces were tapped. It was an idle and a pleasant life; but he enjoyed it, knowing, as did every one else in the works, that it was no more than a preparation for the sterner business of Saturdays.