“Come with me,” laughed Reivers, swinging toward the door. “We’re just in time for lesson number one on how to run a camp efficiently.”
CHAPTER XI—“HELL-CAMP” COURT
As Reivers led the way out of the shop Toppy saw that Miss Pearson was standing in the door of the office across the way. He saw also that she was looking at him. He did not respond to her look nor volunteer a greeting, but deliberately looked away from her as he kept pace with Reivers, who was setting the way toward the gate of the stockade.
It was a morning such as the one when, back in Rail Head, the girl had kicked up the snow and said to him, “Isn’t it glorious?” But since then Toppy felt bitterly that he had grown so much older, so disillusioned, that never again would he be guilty of the tender feelings that the girl had evoked that morning. The sun was bright, the crisp air invigorating, and the blood bounded gloriously through his young body. But Toppy did not wax enthusiastic.
He was grimly glad of the mighty stream of life that he felt surging within him; he would have use for all the might later on. But no more. The world was a harder, a less pretty place than he, in his inexperience, had fancied it before coming to Hell Camp.
“What’s this lesson?” he asked gruffly of Reivers. “What are you going to show me?”
“A little secret in the art of keeping brute-men satisfied with the place in life which a superior mind has allotted to them,” replied Reivers. “What is the first need of the brute? Food, of course. And the second is—fight. Give the lower orders of mankind, which is the kind to use in running a camp efficiently, plenty of food and fight, and the problem of restlessness is solved.
“That’s history, Treplin, as you know. If these foolish, timid capitalists and leaders of men who are searching their petty souls for a remedy to combat the ravages of the modern disease called Socialism only would read history intelligently, they would find the remedy made to order. Fight! War! Give the lower brutes war; let ’em get out and slaughter one another, and they’d soon forget their pitiful, clumsy attempts to think for themselves. Give them guns with a little sharp steel on the end of the barrel, turn them loose on each other—any excuse would do—and they’d soon be so busy driving said steel into one another’s thick bodies that the leaders could slip the yoke back on their necks and get ’em under hand again, where they belong.
“And they’d be happier, too, because a man-brute has got to have so much fighting, or what he calls his brain begins to trouble him; and then he imagines he has a soul and is otherwise unhappy. If there is fighting, or the certain prospect of fighting, there’s no alleged thinking. There’s the solution of all difficulties with the lower orders. Of course you’ve noticed how perfectly contented and happy the men in this camp are?” he laughed, turning suddenly on Toppy.
“Yes,” said Toppy. “Especially Rosky and his bunch.”