By day he raged in the thick of the men with only one thought or aim—to get out the logs as fast as human and horse-power could do it. At night the road-crews, repairing with pick and shovel and sprinkling-tanks the wear and tear of the day’s hauling, worked under Reivers’ compelling eyes. All night long the sprinkling-tanks went up and down the ice-coated roads, and the drivers, freezing on the seats, were afraid to stop or nod, not knowing when the Snow-Burner might step out from the shadows and catch them in the act. The number of accidents, always too plentiful in logging-camps, multiplied, but Reivers permitted nothing short of broken bones to send a man to his bunk. Toppy, besides his work in the shop, cared as best he could for the disabled. Reivers had no time to waste that way now. The two men hurt at the quarry were recovering rapidly. One day a tall, lean “white man,” a Yankee top-loader, came hobbling out of the woods with his foot dangling at the ankle, and mumbling curses through a smashed jaw. “How did you get this?” asked Toppy, as he dressed the cruelly crushed foot. “Pinched between two logs,” mumbled the man. “They let one come down the skids when I wasn’t lookin’. No fault of mine; I didn’t have time to jump. And then, when I’m standin’ there leanin’ against a tree, that devil Reivers comes up and hands me this.” He pointed to his cracked jaw. “He’ll teach me to get myself hurt, he says. ——! That ain’t no man; he’s a devil! By ——! I know what I’d ruther have than the wages comin’ to me, and that’s a rifle with one good cattridge in it and that —— standin’ afore me.” Yet that evening, when Reivers came to the top-loader’s bunk and demanded how long he expected to lie there eating his head off, the man cringed and whimpered that he would be back on the job as soon as his foot was fit to stand on. In Reivers’ presence the men were afraid to call their thoughts their own, but behind his back the mumblings and grumblings of hatred were growing to a volume which inevitably soon must break out in the hell-yelp of a mob ripe for murder. Reivers knew it better than any man in camp. To indicate how it affected him he turned the screws on tighter than ever. Once, at least, “they had him dead,” as they admitted, when he stood ankle-deep in the river with the saw-logs thundering over the rollways to the brink of the bluff above his head. One cunning twist of a peavey would have sent a dozen logs tumbling over the brink on his head. Reivers sensed his danger and looked up. He smiled. Then he turned and deliberately stood with his back to the men. And no man dared to give his peavey that one cunning twist.