Chapter XVI: The Screws Tighten

That night came the heavy snow for which the loggers had been waiting, and a rush of activity followed in Hell Camp. The logs which had lain in the woods for want of sleighing now were accessible. Following the snow came hard, freezing nights, and the main ice-roads which Reivers had driven into the timber for miles became solid beds of ice over which a team could haul log loads to the extent of a carload weight. It was ideal logging-weather, and the big camp began to hum.

The mastery of Reivers once more showed itself in the way in which he drove his great crew at top speed and beyond. The feeling against him on the part of the men had risen to silent, tight-lipped heat as the news went around of how the old Magyar with the ear-rings had met his death. Each man in camp knew that he might have been in the old man's shoes; each knew that Reivers' anger might fall on him next. In the total of a hundred and fifty men in camp there was probably not one who did not curse Reivers and rage against his rule, and there were few who, if the opportunity had offered, would not cheerfully have taken his life.

The feeling against him had unified itself. Before, the men had been split into various groups on the subject of the boss. They remained divided now, but on one thing they were unanimous: the Snow-Burner had gone too far to bear. Men sat on the bunk-edges in the stockade and cursed as they thought of the boss and the shotgun guards that rendered them helpless. Reivers permitted no firearms of any kind in camp save those that were carried by his gunmen.

The gunmen when not on guard kept to their quarters, in the building just outside of the stockade gate, where Reivers also lived. When armed, they were ordered to permit no man to approach nearer than ten feet to them--this to prevent a possible rushing and wresting the weapons from their hands. So long as the guards were there in possession of their shotguns the men knew that they were helpless. Driven to desperation now, they prayed for the chance to get those guns into their own hands. After that they promised themselves that the score of brutality would be made even.

Then came the time for rush work, and under the lash of Reivers' will the outraged men, carried off their feet, were driven with a ferocity that told how completely Reivers ignored the spirit of revolt which he knew was fomenting against him. He quit playing with them, as he expressed it; he began to drive.

Long before daylight began to grey the sky above the eastern timber-line the men were out at their posts, waiting for sufficient light to begin the day's work. Once the work began it went ahead with a fury that seemed to carry all men with it. Reivers was everywhere that a man dared to pause for a moment to shirk his job. He used his hands now, for a broken leg or rib laid a man up, and he had use for the present for every man he could muster. He scarcely looked at the men he hit, breaking their faces with a sudden, treacherous blow, cursing them coldly until, despite their injuries, they leaped at their work, then whirling away to fall upon some other luckless one elsewhere.

He was a fury, a merciless elemental force, with no consideration for the strength and endurance of men; sparing no one any more than he spared himself, and rushing his whole force along at top speed by sheer power of the spirit of leadership that possessed him. Men ceased for the time being to growl and pray that the Snow-Burner would get his just due. They had no thought nor energies for anything but keeping pace in the whirlwind rush of work through which the Snow-Burner drove them.

In the blacksmith-shop the same condition prevailed as elsewhere in the camp. The extra hurry of the work in the timber meant extra accidents, which meant breakages. There were chain-links to be forged and fitted to broken chains; sharp two-inch calks to be driven into the horses' shoes, peaveys and cant-hooks to be repaired. Besides the regular blacksmith-work of the camp, which was quite sufficient to keep Campbell and one helper comfortably employed, there was now added each day a bulk of extra work due to the strain under which men, horses and tools were working.

Old Campbell, grimly resolute that Reivers should have no excuse to fall foul of him, drove himself and his helper at a speed second only to that with which he had so roughly greeted Toppy to the rough world of bodily labour. But the Toppy who now hammered and toiled at Campbell's side was a different man from the champagne-softened youth who had come into camp a little while before. The puffiness was gone from under his eyes, the looseness from his lips and the fat from around the middle. Through his veins the blood now surged with no taint of cumbering poison; his tissues tingled with life and healthiness.

Day by day he did his share and more in the shop-work, and instead of the old feeling of fatigue, which before had followed any prolonged exertion, felt his muscles spring with hardness and new life at each demand made upon them. The old joy of a strong man in his strength came back in him. Stripped to the waist he stretched himself and filled his great lungs with deep drafts, his arms like beams stretched out and above his head. Under the clean skin, rosy and moist from exertion, the muscles bunched and relaxed, tautened instantly to iron hardness or rippled softly as they were called upon, in the perfect co-ordination which results in great athletes. Old Campbell, similarly stripped, stared at the marvel of a giant's perfect torso, beside which his own work-wrought body was ugly in its unequal development.

"Losh, man! But you're full grown!" he growled in admiration. "I've seen but one man who could strip anywhere near to you."

"Who was he?" asked Toppy.

"The Snow-Burner."

Day by day Toppy hammered and laboured at Campbell's side, holding his end up against the grim old smith, and day by day he felt his muscles growing toward that iron condition in which there is no tiring. Presently, to Scotty's vexation, he was doing more than his share, ending the day with a laugh and waking up in the morning as fresh as if he had not taxed his energies the day before.

At first he continued to favour his injured ankle, lest a sudden strain delay its recovery. Each night he massaged and bandaged it scientifically. Later on, when he felt that it was stronger, he began to exercise it, slowly raising and lowering himself on the balls of his feet. In a couple of weeks the old spring and strength had largely come back, and Campbell snorted in disgust at the antics indulged in by his helper when the day's work was done.

"Skipping a rope one, twa hundred times! What brand o' silliness do ye call that?" he grumbled. "Ha' ye nothing useful to do wi' them long legs of yourn, that you have to make a jumping-jack out o' yourself?"

At which Toppy smiled grimly and continued his training.

The rush of work had its compensations. Reivers, driving his force like mad, had no time to waste either in bantering Toppy and Campbell in the evening or in paying attention to Miss Pearson. All the power that was in the Snow-Burner was concentrated upon the problem of getting out every stick of timber possible while the favourable weather continued. He spent most of his time in the timber up-river where the heaviest logging was going on.

By day he raged in the thick of the men with only one thought or aim--to get out the logs as fast as human and horse-power could do it. At night the road-crews, repairing with pick and shovel and sprinkling-tanks the wear and tear of the day's hauling, worked under Reivers' compelling eyes. All night long the sprinkling-tanks went up and down the ice-coated roads, and the drivers, freezing on the seats, were afraid to stop or nod, not knowing when the Snow-Burner might step out from the shadows and catch them in the act.

The number of accidents, always too plentiful in logging-camps, multiplied, but Reivers permitted nothing short of broken bones to send a man to his bunk. Toppy, besides his work in the shop, cared as best he could for the disabled. Reivers had no time to waste that way now. The two men hurt at the quarry were recovering rapidly. One day a tall, lean "white man," a Yankee top-loader, came hobbling out of the woods with his foot dangling at the ankle, and mumbling curses through a smashed jaw.

"How did you get this?" asked Toppy, as he dressed the cruelly crushed foot.

"Pinched between two logs," mumbled the man. "They let one come down the skids when I wasn't lookin'. No fault of mine; I didn't have time to jump. And then, when I'm standin' there leanin' against a tree, that devil Reivers comes up and hands me this." He pointed to his cracked jaw. "He'll teach me to get myself hurt, he says. ----! That ain't no man; he's a devil! By ----! I know what I'd ruther have than the wages comin' to me, and that's a rifle with one good cattridge in it and that ---- standin' afore me."

Yet that evening, when Reivers came to the top-loader's bunk and demanded how long he expected to lie there eating his head off, the man cringed and whimpered that he would be back on the job as soon as his foot was fit to stand on. In Reivers' presence the men were afraid to call their thoughts their own, but behind his back the mumblings and grumblings of hatred were growing to a volume which inevitably soon must break out in the hell-yelp of a mob ripe for murder.

Reivers knew it better than any man in camp. To indicate how it affected him he turned the screws on tighter than ever. Once, at least, "they had him dead," as they admitted, when he stood ankle-deep in the river with the saw-logs thundering over the rollways to the brink of the bluff above his head. One cunning twist of a peavey would have sent a dozen logs tumbling over the brink on his head. Reivers sensed his danger and looked up. He smiled. Then he turned and deliberately stood with his back to the men. And no man dared to give his peavey that one cunning twist.

During these strenuous days Toppy tried in vain to muster up sufficient courage to reopen the conversation with Miss Pearson which had been so suddenly interrupted by the cave-in at the quarry. He saw her every day. She had changed greatly from the high-spirited, self-reliant girl who had stood on the steps of the hotel back at Rail Head and told the whole world by her manner that she was accustomed and able to take care of herself. A stronger will than hers had entered her scheme of life.

Although she knew now that Reivers had tricked her into coming to Hell Camp because he was confident of winning her, the knowledge made no difference. The will of the man dominated and fascinated her. She feared him, yet she was drawn toward him despite her struggles. She fought hard against the inclination to yield to the stronger will, to let her feelings make her his willing slave, as she knew he wished. The pain of the struggle shone in her eyes. Her cheeks lost their bloom; there were lines about the little mouth.

Toppy saw it, but an unwonted shyness had come upon him. He could no longer speak to her with the frank friendliness of their previous conversations. Something which he could not place had, he felt, set them apart.

Perhaps it was the fact that he saw the fascinations which Reivers had for her. Reivers was his enemy. They had been enemies from the moment when they first had measured each other eye to eye. He felt that he had one aim in life now, and one only; that was to prove to himself and to Reivers that Reivers was not his master.

Beyond that he had no plans. He knew that this meant a grapple which must end with one of them broken and helpless. The unfortunate one might be himself. In that case there would be no need to think of the future, and it would be just as well not to have spoken any more with the girl.

It might be Reivers. Then he would be guilty in her eyes of having injured the man for whom the girl now obviously had feelings which Toppy could construe in but one way. She cared for Reivers, in spite of herself; and she would not be inclined to friendliness toward the man who had conquered him, if conquered he should be.

The more Toppy thought it over the less enviable, to his notion, became his standing with the girl. He ended by resolutely determining to put her out of his thoughts. After all, he was no girl's man. He had no business trying to be. For the present he saw one task laid out before him as inevitable as a revealed fate--to prove himself with Reivers, to get to grips with the cold-blooded master-man who had made him feel, with every man in camp, that the place veritably was a Hell Camp.

Reivers' brutal dominance lay like a tangible weight upon Toppy's spirit. He longed for only one thing--for the opportunity to stand up eye to eye with him and learn who was the better man. Beyond that he did not see, nor care. He had given up any thought that the girl might ever care for him.