The men did not raise their heads. They quickened their stumbling steps a little, as a heavy horse shambles forward a little under the whip. One or two looked back, beyond where Toppy was walking at the side of the line. Treplin with curiosity followed their glances. A grim-lipped shotgun guard with a hideous hawk nose had emerged from the darkness, and with his short-barrelled weapon in the crook of his arm was following the line at a distance of fifty or sixty feet. Toppy halted abruptly. So did the guard. “What’s the idea?” demanded Toppy. “Reivers send you?” “Yes,” said the guard gruffly. “Does it take two of us to make this gang work?” Toppy was irritated. Reivers, he knew, would have handled the gang alone. “The boss sent me,” said the guard, with a finality that indicated that for him that ended the discussion. The daylight now came wanly up the gap made in the forest by the brawling river, and the men stood irresolute before the quarry and peered up anxiously at the roof of the pit. “Grab your tools,” said Toppy. “Get in there and get to it.” The men, some of them taking picks and crowbars, some wheelbarrows, were soon ready to begin the day’s work. But there was a hitch somewhere. They stood at the entrance to the pit and did not go in. They looked up at the threatening roof; then they looked anxiously, pleadingly, at Toppy. But Toppy was thinking savagely of how Reivers would have handled the gang alone and he paid no attention. “Get in there!” he roared. “Come on; get to work!” Accustomed to being driven, they responded at once to his command. Between two fears, fear of the dropping rocks and fear of the man over them, they entered the quarry and began the day’s work. The guard took up a position on a slight eminence, where he was always in plain sight of the men, whether in the cave or wheeling the rock out to the dam. He held his gun constantly in the hollow of his arm, like a hunter. Ten minutes after the first crowbar had clanged against rock in the quarry there was a rumbling sound, a crash, a scream; and the men came scrambling out in terror. Their rush stopped abruptly just outside the cave. Toppy was standing directly before them; the man with the gun had noisily cocked his weapon and brought the black barrel to bear on the heads of the men. Half of them slunk at once back into the cave. One of the others held up a bleeding hand to Toppy. “Ah, pleess, bahss, pleess,” he pleaded. “Rock kill us next time. Pleess, bahss!” There was a moment of silence while Toppy looked at the men’s terror-stricken faces. The shotgun guard rattled the slide on his gun. The men began to retreat into the cave, their helplessness and hopelessness writ large upon their flat faces. “Hold on there!” said Toppy suddenly. After all, a fellow couldn’t do things like that—drive helpless cattle like these to certain injury, even possible death. “I’ll take a look in there.”