Chapter XII: Toppy's First Move

Next morning, in the cold stillness which precedes the coming of daylight in the North, Toppy stood leaning on his axe-handle cane and watched his crew of a dozen men file out of the stockade gate and turn toward the stone-quarry. They walked with the driven air of prisoners going to punishment. In the darkness their squat, shapeless figures were scarcely human. Their heads hung, their steps were listless, as if they had just completed a hard day's work instead of having arisen from a hearty breakfast.

The complete lack of spirit evinced by the men irritated Toppy. Was Reivers right after all? Were they nothing but clods, undeserving of fair and intelligent treatment?

"Hey! Wake up there! You look like a bunch of corpses. Show some life!" cried Toppy, in whom the bitter morning air was sending the red blood tingling.

The men did not raise their heads. They quickened their stumbling steps a little, as a heavy horse shambles forward a little under the whip. One or two looked back, beyond where Toppy was walking at the side of the line. Treplin with curiosity followed their glances. A grim-lipped shotgun guard with a hideous hawk nose had emerged from the darkness, and with his short-barrelled weapon in the crook of his arm was following the line at a distance of fifty or sixty feet. Toppy halted abruptly. So did the guard.

"What's the idea?" demanded Toppy. "Reivers send you?"

"Yes," said the guard gruffly.

"Does it take two of us to make this gang work?" Toppy was irritated. Reivers, he knew, would have handled the gang alone.

"The boss sent me," said the guard, with a finality that indicated that for him that ended the discussion.

The daylight now came wanly up the gap made in the forest by the brawling river, and the men stood irresolute before the quarry and peered up anxiously at the roof of the pit.

"Grab your tools," said Toppy. "Get in there and get to it."

The men, some of them taking picks and crowbars, some wheelbarrows, were soon ready to begin the day's work. But there was a hitch somewhere. They stood at the entrance to the pit and did not go in. They looked up at the threatening roof; then they looked anxiously, pleadingly, at Toppy. But Toppy was thinking savagely of how Reivers would have handled the gang alone and he paid no attention.

"Get in there!" he roared. "Come on; get to work!"

Accustomed to being driven, they responded at once to his command. Between two fears, fear of the dropping rocks and fear of the man over them, they entered the quarry and began the day's work. The guard took up a position on a slight eminence, where he was always in plain sight of the men, whether in the cave or wheeling the rock out to the dam. He held his gun constantly in the hollow of his arm, like a hunter.

Ten minutes after the first crowbar had clanged against rock in the quarry there was a rumbling sound, a crash, a scream; and the men came scrambling out in terror. Their rush stopped abruptly just outside the cave. Toppy was standing directly before them; the man with the gun had noisily cocked his weapon and brought the black barrel to bear on the heads of the men. Half of them slunk at once back into the cave. One of the others held up a bleeding hand to Toppy.

"Ah, pleess, bahss, pleess," he pleaded. "Rock kill us next time. Pleess, bahss!"

There was a moment of silence while Toppy looked at the men's terror-stricken faces. The shotgun guard rattled the slide on his gun. The men began to retreat into the cave, their helplessness and hopelessness writ large upon their flat faces.

"Hold on there!" said Toppy suddenly. After all, a fellow couldn't do things like that--drive helpless cattle like these to certain injury, even possible death. "I'll take a look in there."

He hobbled and shouldered his way through the men and entered the pit. A few rocks had dropped from the roof, luckily falling in a far corner beyond where the men were working. But Toppy saw at once how serious this petty accident was; for the whole roof of the cave now was loosened, and as sure as the men pounded and pried at the rocks beneath they would bring a shower of stone down upon their heads.

"Like rats in a trap," he thought. "Hi!" he called. "Get out of here. Get out!"

Down near the dam he had noticed a huge pile of old timbers which probably had been used for piling while the dam was being put in. Thither he now led his men, and shouldering the largest piece himself he hobbled back to the cave followed by the gang, each bearing a timber. A sudden change had come over the men as he indicated what he was going to do. They moved more rapidly. Their terror was gone. Some of them smiled, and some talked excitedly. Under Toppy's direction they went to work with a vim shoring up the loosened roof of the cave. It was only a half-hour's work to place the props so that the men working beneath were free of any serious danger from above. Toppy could sense the change of feeling toward him that had come over the men as they saw the timbers go into place, and he was forced to admit that it warmed him comfortably. They sprang eagerly to obey his slightest behest, and the gratitude in their faces was pitiful to behold.

"Now jump!" said Toppy when the roof was safely propped. "Hustle and make up the time we've lost."

As he came out of the cave the place fairly rang with noise as the men furiously tore loose the rock and dumped it in the barrows. Toppy took a long breath and wiped his brow. The hawk-nosed guard spat in disgust.

"Will you do me a favour?" said Toppy, suddenly swinging toward him.

"What is it?" asked the man.

"Take a message to Mr. Reivers from me. Tell him your services are no longer required at this spot. Tell him I said you looked like a fool, standing up there with your bum gun. Tell him--" Toppy, despite his sore ankle, had swung up the rise and was beside the guard before the latter thought of making a move--"that I said I'd throw you and your gun in the river if you didn't duck. And for your own information--" Toppy was towering over the man--"I'll do it right now, unless you get out of here--quick!"

The guard's shifty eyes tried to meet Toppy's and failed. Against the Slavs he would have dared to use his gun; they were his inferiors. Against Toppy he did not dare even so much as to think of the weapon, and without it he was only a jail-rat, afraid of men who looked him in the eyes.

"The boss sent me here," he said sullenly.

Toppy leaned forward until his face was close to the guard's. The man shrank.

"Duck!" said Toppy. That was all. The guard moved away with an alacrity that showed how uncomfortable the spot had become to him.

"You'll hear about this!" he whined from a distance.

And Toppy laughed, laughed carelessly and loudly, rampant with the sensation of power. The men, scurrying past with barrows of rock, noted the retreat of the guard and smiled. They looked up at Toppy with slavish admiration, as lesser men look up to the champion who has triumphed before their eyes. One or two of the older men raised their hats as they passed him, their Old-World serf-like way of showing how they felt toward him.

"Jump!" ordered Toppy gruffly. "Get a move on there; make up that lost time."

Reivers had said that a hundred barrows an hour must be dumped into the dam. With a half hour lost in shoring up the roof, there were fifty loads to be caught up during the day if the average was to be maintained. Carefully timing each load and keeping tally for half an hour, Toppy saw that a hundred loads per hour was the limit of his gang working at a normal pace. To get out the hundred loads they must keep steadily at work, with no time lost because of the falling rocks from above.

He began to see the method of Reivers' apparent madness in placing him in charge of the gang. With the gang working in the dead, terrorised fashion that had characterised their movements before the timbers were in place, Toppy knew that he would have failed; he could not have got out the hundred loads per hour. Reivers would have proved him to be his inferior; for Reivers, with his inhumanity, would have driven the gang as if no lives nor limbs hung on the tissue.

Toppy smiled grimly as he looked at his watch and marked new figures on the tally sheet. The men, pitifully grateful for the protecting timbers, had taken hold of their work with such new life that the rock was going into the dam at the rate of one hundred and twenty loads an hour.

"Move number one!" muttered Toppy, snapping shut his watch. "I wonder what the Snow-Burner's come-back will be when he knows. Hey, you roughnecks! Keep moving, there; keep moving!"

The men responded cheerfully to his every command. They could gladly obey his will; they were safe under him; he had taken care of them, the helpless ones. That evening, when they filed back into the stockade under Toppy's watchful eye, one of the older men, a swarthy old fellow with large brass rings in his ears, sank his hat low as he passed in.

"Buna nopte, Domnule," he said humbly.

"What did he say?" demanded Toppy of one of the young men who knew a little English.

"Plees, bahss; old man, he Magyar," was the reply. "He say, 'Good night, master.'"

Toppy stood dumfounded while the line passed through the gate.

"Well," he said with a grin, "what do you know about that?"