“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.