The Snow-Burner

by Henry Oyen

The Snow-Burner never had done anything like that. He had laid low the biggest men in camp, but it was usually with a kick or with a blow that was entirely unexpected. The Snow-Burner never warned any body. He smiled, threw them off their guard, then smote like a flash of lightning. He had whipped half a dozen men at once in a stand-up fight, but they had been poor Bohunks, fools who couldn’t fight unless they had knives in their hands. But to tell a seasoned bruiser like Bill, the best man with his fists in camp, to put up his hands and then beat him to the knockout punch—that was something that not even the Snow-Burner had attempted to do.

That was taking a chance, that was; and the Snow-Burner never took chances. That was why these cruel-fierce “white men,” though they admired and applauded him for his dominance and his ruthlessness toward the Slavs, hated Reivers with a hatred that sprang from the Northern man’s instinctive liking for fair play in a fight. They began naturally to compare him with Toppy, who had played fair and yet won. And, naturally, because such were the standards they lived and died by, they began to predict that some day the Snow-Burner and Toppy must fight, and they hoped that they might be there to see the battle.

So Toppy, this morning, as he came to the stockade, was in the position of something of a hero to most of the rough men who slouched past him in the gloom to their day’s work. He had felt it before, this hero-worship, and he recognised it again. Though the surroundings were vastly different and the men about him of a strange breeding, the sense of it was much the same as that he had known at school when, a sweater thrown across his huge shoulders, he had ploughed his way through the groups of worshipping undergrads on to the gridiron. It was much the same here. Men looked up to him. They nudged one another as they passed, lowered their voices when he was near, studied him appraisingly. Toppy had felt it before, too often to be mistaken; and the youth in his veins responded warmly. The respect of these men was a harder thing to win than the other. He thought of how he had arrived in camp, shaky from Harvey Duncombe’s champagne, with no purpose in life, no standing among men who were doing men’s work. Grimly also he thought of how Miss Pearson, that first evening, had called him a “nice boy.” Would she call him that now, he wondered, if she could see how these rough, tired men looked up to him? Would Reivers treat him as a thing to experiment with after this?

Thus it was a considerably elated Toppy, though not a big-headed one, who led his men out of the stockade, to the quarry—to the blow that Reivers had waiting for him there. His first hint that something was wrong was when the foremost men, whistling and tool-laden, made for the pit in the first grey light of day and paused with exclamations and curses at its very mouth. Others crowded around them. They looked within. Then, with fallen jaws, they turned and looked to the “bahss” for an explanation, for help.

Toppy shouldered his way through the press and stepped inside. Then he saw what had halted his men and made their faces turn white. To the last stick the shoring-timbers had been removed from the pit, and the roof, threatening and sharp-edged, hung ready to drop on the workmen below, as it had before Toppy had wrought a change.

The daylight came creeping up the river and a wind began to blow. So still was it there before the pit-mouth that Toppy was conscious of these things as he stepped outside. The men were standing about with their wheelbarrows and tools in their hands. They looked to him. His was the mind and will to determine what they should do. They depended upon him; they trusted him; they would obey his word confidently.

Toppy felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He wanted to take off his cap, to bare his head to the chill morning wind, to draw his hand across his eyes, to do something to ease himself and gather his wits. He did none of these things. The instinct of leadership arose strong within him. He could not show these men who looked up to him as their unquestioned leader that he had been dealt a blow that had taken the mastery from him.

For Toppy, in that agonised second when he glanced up at the unsupported roof and knew what those loose rocks meant to any men working beneath, realised that he could not drive his men in there to certain injury for many, possibly death for some. It wasn’t in him. He wasn’t bred that way. The unfeeling brute had been removed from his big body and spirit by generations of men and women who had played fair with inferiors, and by a lifetime of training and education.

He understood plainly the significance of the thing. Reivers had done it; no one else would have dared. He had lifted Toppy up to a tiny elevation above the other men in camp; now he was knocking him down. It was another way for Reivers to show his mastery. The men who had begun to look up to Toppy would now see how easily the Snow-Burner could show himself his superior. Miss Pearson would hear of it. He would appear in the light of a “nice boy” whom the Snow-Burner had played with.

These thoughts ran through Toppy’s mind as he stood outside the pit, with his white-faced men looking up to him, and groped for a way out of his dilemma. Within he was sickened with the sense of a catastrophe; outside he remained calm and confident to the eye. He stepped farther out, to where he could see the end of the dam where he had secured the props for the roof. It was as he had expected; the big pile of timbers that had lain there was gone to the last stick. He turned slowly back, and then in the grey light of coming day he looked into the playfully smiling face of Reivers, who had emerged, it seemed, from nowhere.