Explore "The Black Opal" by Katharine Susannah Prichard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The men stood in groups outside the hall, smoking and yarning together before going into it, on the night John Armitage was to put his proposition for reorganisation of the mines before them. Each group formed itself of men whose minds were inclined in the same direction. M'Ginnis was the centre of the crowd from the Punti rush who were prepared to accept Armitage's scheme. The Crosses, while they would not go over to the M'Ginnis faction, had a following -- and the group about them was by far the largest -- which was asserting an open mind until it heard what Armitage had to say. Archie and Ted Cross and the men with them, however, were suspected of a prejudice rather in favour of, than against, Armitage's outline of the new order of things for the Ridge since its main features and conditions were known. Men who were prepared at all costs to stand by the principle which had held the gougers of Fallen Star Ridge, together for so long, and whose loyalty to the old spirit of independence was immutable, gathered round George Woods and Watty Frost.
"Thing that's surprised me," Pony-Fence Inglewood murmured, "is the numbers of men there is who wants to hear what Armitage has got to say. I wouldn't 've thought there'd be so many."