There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars

There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars. They had been stacked too high, or perhaps there was an irregularity in one of the rows, Rob was enjoying the glean of the sun on the wet metal when the driver of a dray, with loud commands and a cracking of his whip and tugging on his reins, backed his dirty horses too far and too fast, so that the rear of the heavy wagon hit the pile with a thud.

Rob long had vowed that his boys would not play on the docks. He hated drays. Never did he see one but that he thought of his brother Samuel being crashed to death under the wheels of a freight wagon. Now he watched in horror as another accident occurred.

The iron bar at the top was jarred forward, so that it teetered at the edge and the began to slide over the lip of a pile, followed by two more.

There was a shouted cry of warning and a desperate human scattering, but two of the slaves had others in front of them. They fell as they scrabbled, so that the full weight of one of the pigs of iron came down on one of them, crushing life from him in an instant.

One end of another pig slammed down on the other man's lower right leg, and his screaming incited rob to action.

'Here, get it off them. Quickly and carefully, now! He said and half a dozen slaves lifted the iron bars from the two men.

He had them moved well away from the pile of iron. A single glance was all that was necessary to ascertain that the man who had taken the full brunt was dead. His chest was crushed and he had been throttled by a broken windpipe, so his face already was dark and engorged.

The other slave no longer was screaming, having fainted when he was moved. It was just as well; his foot and ankle were fearsomely mangled and Rob could do nothing to restore them. He dispatched a slave to his house to fetch his surgical kit from Mary, and while the wounded man was unconscious he incised the healthy skin above the injury and began to flay it back to make a flap, and then to slice through meat and muscle.

Form the man arose a personal stink that made Rob nervous and afraid, the stench of a human animal who had sweated in toil again and again until his unwashed rags had absorbed his rotten smell and compounded it and made it almost a tangible part of him like his shaven slave's head or the foot Rob was in the process of removing. It caused Rob to remember the two similarity stinking stevedore slaves who had carried Dad home from his job on the docks, home to die

From the book “The physician” by Noah Gordon.