“Do you want to feel if I can’t?” demanded Lou, and his eyes were wicked absolutely.
Steve went, never looking back. Lou turned to his team. The leaders were dying where they stood, brought to their feet only by the point of the knife. The power of it goaded them into the under-scrub at the track-side, where they pitched sideways among soft-headed moss and maiden-hair and the flower of the wild strawberry to meet death with wrath and black pain.
Three hours later Lou brought his shrunk team down to the tram-head. There was a heathenish bandage round his arm, and a tourniquet hugging the thick of it. He crawled up the logging-bank, cast off the grip opposite the waiting trolley, stumbled into a ganger’s hands, and lay there.
Purdey bound the woiuid that night with the tenderness of a woman. Then he tongue-lashed Lou into white fury before all the Camp. For carelessness was the unforgivable sin beyond North-of-Sunday, and without doubt, Lou’s grip had never been properly set. Tod carried the truth back to Mains—with a couple of black eyes as a voucher.
“Be aisy till I tell you, thin,” he said. “Sure, it’s the unnathural ugly objic’ Pug Chaney is when he comes out of the ind of a mill wid Steve to do the clappin’ on him. Bedad, it’s Steve is the quare ould slogger an’ all of it!
