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Updated: June 19, 2025
A roar of cannon seemed to tear their ear-drums another and another everywhere about them. With one mind five hundred imaginative workmen dropped their weapons from nerveless hands and fled, bumping, tumbling, fighting each other. A voiceless flow of chaotic clamour marked their course toward the camp. Koppy, teeth gnashing, threw up his hands and slunk into the darkness.
Go home!" Yet he turned his back before she did, and even as she started away she knew he knew that he could not harm her. She ran as she had never run before, clutching her work in a grim little fist, not from fear of Koppy but of the strange thing she had seen.
A twenty-third, not so vile-featured but swarthier of skin, sank softly against the logs at the rear of the shack, one ear pressed to a chink. "You've gone the rounds?" demanded Koppy, probing each face in turn. One of the men spoke hesitatingly: "Simoff's rifles gone. We find place all gone." Koppy turned on him. "Sure?"
Koppy was too tractable, the camp too peaceful. In the idleness of those days he had time to brood over that. But he set his face stubbornly against the fears her words aroused. He could see the trestle sound and solid as a rock. The camp lay beneath him, as quiet as a country village. Only a week or two and everything would be settled. He scoffed at his fears.
A thin stream of blood trickled down his wrist. Not another blow was struck. It was not the casualties, not alone the sound of the rifle, but rather the uncanny mystery of the hidden marksman and his aim. Almost before the two hard-pressed men dare look about them, the river bottom was empty of life, save for themselves and Koppy, and two or three delayed by the nature of their wounds.
Some instinct made him wish to move things beyond the eyes of the camp. For a moment the men hesitated, then, pushed into the lead, Werner led the way inside. "Now," snapped the contractor, "get it off your chests. Where's Satan himself Koppy, I mean?" The most intelligent of the visitors, the most capable of estimating the underlying significance of tone and inflection, was Lefty Werner.
Koppy gloomed at him beneath heavy eyebrows, giving little clue to the thoughts behind. "What next?" What he really meant was of what profit to the leaders to yield now. Werner's keen wits read it. Volubly he suggested a rearguard of the better fighters to cover the retreat of the leaders and the rest; the besieged would not dare press them. In reality a personal inspiration lay behind it all.
"I'm not, of course!" "Sometimes I question it. Werner and Morani and Heppel were sent by the bohunks. With Koppy they have the whole bunch in the hollow of their hands. We couldn't face a strike at this time of the year; we'd never get another crew now till next spring and you couldn't stand that. . . . Don't imagine you've cowed them through their delegation.
A veil seemed to fall over his eyes. A drop of sweat fell to his rifle butt. When he could see once more he slowly drew back the gun, eyes staring. Slowly he turned to the expectant faces below him. They knew nothing of what had happened was happening out there on the trestle. But they felt in some vague way that he was failing them. With deliberation Koppy shifted his rifle about, reversing it.
Perhaps it was the darting, all-seeing eyes, perhaps the exaggeration of diffidence, but Koppy gave the impression of thinking more than he said. "When we need help " Torrance began furiously. Conrad cut in more quietly, but he was evidently holding himself in check. "And so you sneak up and listen hide in the trees?" "No sneak." Something stronger peeped through Koppy's veneer.
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