Toppy shook his head. He was in no mood to debate abstract problems with Reivers.
“Count me out until I’m a little acquainted with the situation,” he said. “I’m a stranger in a strange land. I’ve just dropped in—from almost another world you might say.”
In a vain attempt to escape taking sides in what was evidently an old argument he hurriedly rattled off the story of his coming to Rail Head and thence to Hell Camp, omitting to mention, however, that it was Miss Pearson who was responsible for the latter part of his journey. Reivers smote his huge fist upon the table as Toppy finished.
“That’s the kind of a man for me!” he laughed. “Got tired of living the life of his class, and just stepped out of it. No explanations; no acknowledgement of obligations to anybody. Master of his own soul. To —— with the niceties of civilisation! Treplin, you’re a man after my own scheme of life; I did the same thing once—only I was sober.
“But let’s get back to our subject. Here’s the situation: This camp is on a natural town-site. There’s water-power, ore and timber. To use the water-power we must build a dam; to use the timber we must get it to the saws. That takes labour, lots of it—muscle-and-bone labour. Labour is scarce up here. It is too far from the pigsties of towns. Men would come, work a few days, and go away. The purpose of the place would be defeated—unless the men are kept here at work.
“That’s what I do. I keep them here. To do it I keep them locked up at night like the cattle they are. By day I have them guarded by armed man-killers—every one of my guards is a fugitive from man’s silly laws, principally from the one which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
“But my best guard is Fear—by which I rule alike my guards and the poor brutes who are necessary to my purpose. There you are: a hundred and fifty of them, fearing and hating me, and I’m making them do as I please. No foolishness about laws, about order, about right or wrong. Just a hundred and fifty half-beasts and myself out here in the woods. As a man with a trained mind, do you think I can keep it up? Or do you think there is mental energy enough in that mess of human protoplasm to muster up nerve enough to put out my light, as Scotty puts it? It’s a problem that furnishes interesting mental gymnastics.”
He propounded the problem with absolutely no trace of personal interest. To judge by his manner, the matter of his life or death meant nothing to him. It was merely an interesting question on which to expend the energy fulminating in his mind. In his light-blue eyes there seemed to gleam the same impersonal brutality which had shown out when he so casually crippled Rosky.
“Oh, it’s an impossible proposition, Reivers!” exploded Toppy, with the picture of the writhing Slav in his mind’s eye. “You’ve got to consider right and wrong when dealing with human beings. It isn’t natural; Nature won’t stand it.”
“Ah!” Reivers’ eyes lighted up with intellectual delight. “That’s an idea! Scotty, you hear? You’ve been talking about my perishing by the sword, but you haven’t given any reason why. Treplin does. He says Nature will revolt, because my system is unnatural.” He threw back his head and laughed coldly. “Rot, Treplin—silly, effeminate, bookish rot!” he roared. “Nature has respect only for the strong. It creates the weaker species merely to give the stronger food to remain strong on.”