The winter rioted on its way. Snow, rain, and wind whirled around us in the cutting, and wet us to the bone. It was a difficult feat to close our hands tightly over the hammers with which we took uncertain aim at the drill heads and jumper ends. The drill holder cowered on his seat and feared for the moment when an erring hammer might fly clear and finish his labours for ever. Hourly our tempers grew worse, each movement of the body caused annoyance and discomfort, and we quarrelled over the most trivial matters. Red Billy cursed every man in turn and all in general, until big Jim Maloney lost his temper completely and struck the ganger on the jaw with his fist, knocking him senseless into a snowdrift.
That night Maloney was handed his lying time and told to slide. He padded from Kinlochleven in the darkness, and I have never seen him since then. He must have died on the journey. No man could cross those mountains in the darkness of mid-winter and in the teeth of a snowstorm.
Some time afterwards the copy of a Glasgow newspaper, either the Evening Times or News (I now forget which), came into our shack wrapped around some provisions, and in the paper I read a paragraph concerning the discovery of a dead body on the mountains of Argyllshire. While looking after sheep a shepherd came on the corpse of a man that lay rotting in a thawing snowdrift. Around the remains a large number of half-burnt matches were picked up, and it was supposed that the poor fellow had tried to keep himself warm by their feeble flames in the last dreadful hours. Nobody identified him, but the paper stated that he was presumably a navvy who lost his way on a journey to or from the big waterworks of Kinlochleven.
As for myself, I am quite certain that it was that of big Jim Maloney. No man could survive a blizzard on the houseless hills, and big Jim Maloney never appeared in model or shack afterwards.
CHAPTER XXXI THE GREAT EXODUS
"We'll lift our time and go, lads,
The long road lies before,
The places that we know, lads,