The last words came carelessly over his shoulder as he turned back toward the men who were toiling at the rock. A string of curses rolled coldly from his lips. They leaped to obey him. He smiled contemptuously.
Toppy was relieved to see that the two men on the ground were apparently not fatally hurt. With the aid of Campbell and two guards who had run up he hurried to have the men placed in their bunks in the stockade. One of the guards produced a surgeon’s kit. Toppy rolled up his sleeves. It wasn’t as bad as he had feared it would be, apparently; only two injured, where he had looked for some surely to be killed. One of the men was growing faint from loss of blood from a wound in his right leg. Toppy, turning his attention to him first, swiftly slit open the trousers-leg and bared the injured limb.
“What—what the devil?” he cried aghast. The calf of the man’s leg was half torn away, and from knee to ankle the flesh was sprinkled with buckshot-holes.
“They shot you?” he asked as he fashioned a tourniquet.
“Yes, bahass. Snow-Burner say, ‘Get t’ ‘ell in there.’ Rocks fall; we no go in. Snow-Burner hold up hand. Man with gun shoot. I fall. Other men go in. Pretty soon rocks fall. Other men come out. He shoot me. I no do anything; he shoot me.”
Toppy choked back the curse that rose to his lips, dressed the man’s wound to the best of his slight ability, and turned to the other, who had been caught in the cave-in of the quarry-roof. His right leg and arm were broken, and the side was crushed in a way that suggested broken ribs. Toppy filled a hypodermic syringe and went to work to make the two as comfortable as he knew how. That was all he could pretend to do. Yet when he left the stockade it was with a feeling of relief that he looked back over the morning. The worst had happened; the danger to the men was over; and, so far as Toppy knew, the consequences were represented in the two men whom he had treated and who, so far as he could see, were sure to live. It hadn’t turned out as badly as he was afraid it would.
As he passed the carpenter-shop he saw the “wood-butcher” sawing two boards to make a cover for a long, narrow box. Toppy looked at him idly, trying to think of what such a box could be used for around the camp. It was too narrow for its length to be of ordinary use as a box.
“What are you making there?” asked Toppy carelessly.
The “wood-butcher” looked up from his sawing.
“Didn’t you ever see a logging-camp coffin?” he asked. “We always keep a few ready. This one is for that Bohunk that’s down there under the rocks.”