So Toppy, this morning, as he came to the stockade, was in the position of something of a hero to most of the rough men who slouched past him in the gloom to their day’s work. He had felt it before, this hero-worship, and he recognised it again. Though the surroundings were vastly different and the men about him of a strange breeding, the sense of it was much the same as that he had known at school when, a sweater thrown across his huge shoulders, he had ploughed his way through the groups of worshipping undergrads on to the gridiron. It was much the same here. Men looked up to him. They nudged one another as they passed, lowered their voices when he was near, studied him appraisingly. Toppy had felt it before, too often to be mistaken; and the youth in his veins responded warmly. The respect of these men was a harder thing to win than the other. He thought of how he had arrived in camp, shaky from Harvey Duncombe’s champagne, with no purpose in life, no standing among men who were doing men’s work. Grimly also he thought of how Miss Pearson, that first evening, had called him a “nice boy.” Would she call him that now, he wondered, if she could see how these rough, tired men looked up to him? Would Reivers treat him as a thing to experiment with after this? Thus it was a considerably elated Toppy, though not a big-headed one, who led his men out of the stockade, to the quarry—to the blow that Reivers had waiting for him there. His first hint that something was wrong was when the foremost men, whistling and tool-laden, made for the pit in the first grey light of day and paused with exclamations and curses at its very mouth. Others crowded around them. They looked within. Then, with fallen jaws, they turned and looked to the “bahss” for an explanation, for help. Toppy shouldered his way through the press and stepped inside. Then he saw what had halted his men and made their faces turn white. To the last stick the shoring-timbers had been removed from the pit, and the roof, threatening and sharp-edged, hung ready to drop on the workmen below, as it had before Toppy had wrought a change. The daylight came creeping up the river and a wind began to blow. So still was it there before the pit-mouth that Toppy was conscious of these things as he stepped outside. The men were standing about with their wheelbarrows and tools in their hands. They looked to him. His was the mind and will to determine what they should do. They depended upon him; they trusted him; they would obey his word confidently. Toppy felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He wanted to take off his cap, to bare his head to the chill morning wind, to draw his hand across his eyes, to do something to ease himself and gather his wits. He did none of these things. The instinct of leadership arose strong within him. He could not show these men who looked up to him as their unquestioned leader that he had been dealt a blow that had taken the mastery from him.