By four in the morning, the sixty wagon drivers and masons had been working for eighteen hours without a single desertion or punishment breach. They were soaked with freezing rain, their hands raw and blistered, their heavy cart driver coats crusted with yellow river clay. But they worked with the steady, unrushed persistence of men who knew they were building their own survival.
Sister Merrow and the Lowbank women walked the line continuously with pails of hot chicory tea, thick slabs of sourdough bread spread with beef dripping, and dry wool rags to bind raw knuckles. A man’s boots soaked through with icy water. Then, she had him sit on a dry timber balk by the canteen fire, wrapped his feet in warm wool flannel. Then it gave him dry clogs before sending him back to the shovels.
‘No man works hungry. No man works with frozen feet,’ Merrow decreed, ladling steaming pea soup into Miller Tom’s tin bowl. ‘A general wins a battle with gunpowder, Master Tom, but a mechanic wins a flood with hot stew and clean animal fat. If the Senate had spent half their gold on porridge and half on iron shovels, this river would have been tamed fifty years ago.’
