“He accomplished a tiny speck of useful work, through my direction. He has gone, as the wood will soon be gone that is heating that stove. There was no spirit there; only a body that has ceased to stand upright. And you grow moody over it! Well, well! I’m more and more disappointed in you—doctor.”
Toppy said nothing. He was biding his time.
CHAPTER XVI—THE SCREWS TIGHTEN
That night came the heavy snow for which the loggers had been waiting, and a rush of activity followed in Hell Camp. The logs which had lain in the woods for want of sleighing now were accessible. Following the snow came hard, freezing nights, and the main ice-roads which Reivers had driven into the timber for miles became solid beds of ice over which a team could haul log loads to the extent of a carload weight. It was ideal logging-weather, and the big camp began to hum.
The mastery of Reivers once more showed itself in the way in which he drove his great crew at top speed and beyond. The feeling against him on the part of the men had risen to silent, tight-lipped heat as the news went around of how the old Magyar with the ear-rings had met his death. Each man in camp knew that he might have been in the old man’s shoes; each knew that Reivers’ anger might fall on him next. In the total of a hundred and fifty men in camp there was probably not one who did not curse Reivers and rage against his rule, and there were few who, if the opportunity had offered, would not cheerfully have taken his life.
The feeling against him had unified itself. Before, the men had been split into various groups on the subject of the boss. They remained divided now, but on one thing they were unanimous: the Snow-Burner had gone too far to bear. Men sat on the bunk-edges in the stockade and cursed as they thought of the boss and the shotgun guards that rendered them helpless. Reivers permitted no firearms of any kind in camp save those that were carried by his gunmen.
The gunmen when not on guard kept to their quarters, in the building just outside of the stockade gate, where Reivers also lived. When armed, they were ordered to permit no man to approach nearer than ten feet to them—this to prevent a possible rushing and wresting the weapons from their hands. So long as the guards were there in possession of their shotguns the men knew that they were helpless. Driven to desperation now, they prayed for the chance to get those guns into their own hands. After that they promised themselves that the score of brutality would be made even.
Then came the time for rush work, and under the lash of Reivers’ will the outraged men, carried off their feet, were driven with a ferocity that told how completely Reivers ignored the spirit of revolt which he knew was fomenting against him. He quit playing with them, as he expressed it; he began to drive.
Long before daylight began to grey the sky above the eastern timber-line the men were out at their posts, waiting for sufficient light to begin the day’s work. Once the work began it went ahead with a fury that seemed to carry all men with it. Reivers was everywhere that a man dared to pause for a moment to shirk his job. He used his hands now, for a broken leg or rib laid a man up, and he had use for the present for every man he could muster. He scarcely looked at the men he hit, breaking their faces with a sudden, treacherous blow, cursing them coldly until, despite their injuries, they leaped at their work, then whirling away to fall upon some other luckless one elsewhere.
He was a fury, a merciless elemental force, with no consideration for the strength and endurance of men; sparing no one any more than he spared himself, and rushing his whole force along at top speed by sheer power of the spirit of leadership that possessed him. Men ceased for the time being to growl and pray that the Snow-Burner would get his just due. They had no thought nor energies for anything but keeping pace in the whirlwind rush of work through which the Snow-Burner drove them.