As for Long Xu's thoughts, Second Lieutenant Oleg, the cavalry officer who was in charge of the security and defense work here, had different opinions. He believed that the Charuya were hiding like rats in the mountains to the west, and that they could not be easily found. And maybe they had a hundred fighters, maybe two hundred, or even more, and if they didn't fight head-on, but resorted to guerrilla tactics, the people on the east coast would have a lot of headaches.

"We may have a lot of undeserved casualties, but the enemy doesn't necessarily suffer a lot of damage." Second Lieutenant Oleg added, "I suggest it's better to defend on the spot. During the day, our cavalry was in charge of reconnaissance, and the army infantry was in charge of guarding, and at night we were to set up barbed wire fences around the camp and set up sentry posts, so that the barbarians could do nothing with us. ”

Long Xu looked at this former Zaporozhye Cossack in his thirties, and had to admit that what the other party said made sense. It is obviously unrealistic to want to solve the problem once and for all, so it is better to calm down, as Second Lieutenant Oleg said. Ensuring the completion of the railroad and the completion of the walls of Fort Canyon is his first priority, and nothing else matters.

The walls of the castle are about 900 meters long – a typical small inland castle that has been built by 300 immigrants from Ninghai Prefecture in Shandong Province and about 500 South African construction labourers. The railway station houses are now almost complete, and the South African workers are currently building a freight yard, a parking lot, a repair shop and other facilities. Today, there are more than 16,000 South African labourers who are widely active in the East Coast Republic, and since they only need to serve for three years to obtain the status of freemen in South Africa, these people are still highly motivated. With their efforts. Railways and highways have been paved in the country. Houses and barns were built. Truckloads of ore bricks and tiles were produced, which played a huge role in the construction of the East Coast Republic of China.

South Africans were building railroads, while Ming immigrants from Shandong were building walls and temporary wooden houses for themselves. The wooden house is one person per room, this is what the superiors told them, they don't understand very well, the temporary living wooden houses in other places are two or even four people in one room, they can't figure out what they are here for one person and one room, is it too much wood cut back from above? But. Their doubts were quickly answered, and they were thrilled.

About 100 Serbian slave girls, dressed in denim uniforms issued on the east coast, came in more than a dozen carts from the direction of the southern railway line. With a shout from the coachman, the slave girls stood beside the construction site in a daze, holding a small cloth bag containing some clothes and a small amount of silver dollars issued to them by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

The construction site of the canyon fort, where whistles, passwords, and trumpets were heard one after another, suddenly fell silent. Hundreds of Ming immigrants straightened up and stared dumbfoundedly at the large group of "newcomers" over there.

"It's a woman!" Soon someone spread the exciting news to every corner of the construction site, and everyone suddenly lost their minds to work. They were all men in their mid-twenties, and a few were in their teens or forties, but they had one thing in common—they were singles.

Yes! For a variety of reasons. For example, war, famine, poverty, etc., have created a large number of singles in Shandong, and it is not easy for them to even eat enough. Not to mention marrying a daughter-in-law. Those gentlemen have a lot of maidservants in their homes, and they are so poor that they probably won't be able to get a wife until they die. Now I have no choice but to follow these Yi people to the east coast, but I didn't expect it to come to the time - or it can be said that I have hit a big luck, not only to divide them into a house, but also to divide the land, cattle, and sheep next, and now I may even have to give them a daughter-in-law! God is pitiful, who will help me go back to Shandong to see if there is green smoke on my family's ancestral grave!

And the cadres on the east coast, who had been supervising their work very strictly, did not urge them to work at this moment, but gathered together, as if discussing something. After the discussion, they went through the handover formalities with the person in charge of the convoy who escorted the women. With all this in order, Agnelli, the interim head of government at Fort Canyon, announced that he would divide everyone into several teams, each of which would do a part of the work. The management cadres will score each person, and the top 150 people with the highest score will be able to choose a daughter-in-law according to their ranking.

These Serbian slave girls were bought from the Ottoman Empire at great expense by the East Bankers, and they were theoretically considered the "property" of the East Bank government, because they were de jure slaves. In other words, these female slaves bought back from the Ottoman Empire did not have the right to choose their own fate, and they could only passively accept the arrangement of the "master". According to the plan, after being assigned to the newly arrived male immigrants and living there for three years, they would be able to register and receive all the rights of a freedman. And this was clearly told to them from the first day they arrived on the East Coast, and they basically accepted or acquiesced to such a fate—it was much better than being a slave for the rest of their lives and dying.

As the largest "goods" imported from the Ottoman Empire, the slave trade between the two countries is now flourishing. The Ottomans relied on this to balance the huge trade deficit between the two countries with the export of livestock, while the people on the east coast had always adhered to the principle that "money is useless, material is useful", so most of the profits were spent on the purchase of slave girls and horses. There were about 500 female slaves brought back from the Ottoman Empire, and in addition to the 150 who were assigned here, 100 were assigned to the fort of Ningjin (Jose. Pedro. Varela Village) – named after the more than 200 soldiers from Weihai's Weiningjin Station. In addition, about 250 people have been assigned to the Lower Yi River Fort, which is expected to arrive at the pier by the middle of next month, and about 250 Malay women will come with them, which can be regarded as a small surprise and welfare for the single residents of the Lower Yi River Fort.

After explaining the policy to this group of Ming immigrants, the enthusiasm of these people was immediately greatly stimulated. On the same day, some individuals who overfulfilled their tasks began to appear, and after the management cadres gave these people high marks, everyone was in an uproar, and the next day they immediately completed their assigned tasks at a faster speed, and then began to work overtime on their own initiative. Even when it was time to eat, the public cafeteria, which had always been bustling with people, was much more deserted, and only a few dozen older Ming immigrants in their thirties and forties were eating. Their bodies are not as good as those boys, and they are already tired to death when they complete their tasks, and then work overtime? Spare me! Anyway, I heard that there will be a second and third batch of women in the future, so why are you in a hurry? The immigrants who volunteered to work overtime went to the canteen to get a few beef buns, hurriedly ate them, and then continued to work, until it was slightly dark and the management cadres came to urge them to stop work, and then they reluctantly called it off.

Faced with such a situation, Agnelli, the head of civil affairs at Fort Canyon, was overjoyed, and Long Xu, the commander of the 103rd Company of the Army, who had been on guard duty next to him for the past few days, also felt a little funny, hormones are really the best stimulants for men. To him, these Ming people are like animals in estrus in spring, full of infinite energy. However, the construction progress is really much faster, more than a dozen warehouses, town governments, military camps, residences, etc. have been built, and even the underground drainage ditch has been dug for a long time. Soon, a group of about three or four hundred old French and Livonian residents from the east may be transferred to mix with these new Ming immigrants, and when these new labor forces are in place, the construction speed will become faster. And when the walls were completed, there was nothing the Charuya barbarians could do with them.

During this time, Ensign Oleg's hundreds of cavalry had been cruising around the Canyon Fort and had also run into several groups of gaucho bandits. According to him, the gauchos liked to act in groups, as few as five or six people in a group, and as many as seventy or eighty people, armed with flintlock pistols, rifles, leather armour, and Spanish swords that they could never afford, and had been cruising on both sides of the West Ridge, waiting for an opportunity to attack the lone farmers and herdsmen on the east coast, the police, the messengers, and so on. It is not known where these people were supplied or where their nests were, but it is certain that these people were definitely in collusion with the Charuya barbarians, for some of the captured gaucho bandits admitted that they never attacked the Charrua villages, and sometimes received supplies from them.

They don't attack the Charua, perhaps because these warlike barbarians are poor and have little oil, but it is impossible to say that they are not a little greasy. Perhaps it was the hateful Spanish missionaries who were pulling the strings to allow these previously homeless gaucho bandits to rest and resupply in the Chalua villages that inhabited the Negro River valley, thus gaining the ability to continue fighting.

What a bastard! Long Xu's left hand tightly grasped the handle of the command knife on his waist, and he was slightly annoyed in his heart. From the end of August to the middle of September, he had lost a messenger who had traveled to and from the Lower River Fort to deliver news, three migrants who had gone out to chop wood, and a patrol officer who had been killed on a night patrol. Although the losses of those gauchos were greater, such incidents continued to emerge in an endless and extremely irritating manner. Those gauchos are seldom able to grab anything from the East Coasters, but they are always haunted, don't they need to eat? Who pays them? Hmph, Jesuit monks, their hearts and deeds can be punished! (To be continued......)