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Chapter 105 Set off immediately
Xie Hushan was sitting on the open space at the brickyard at the cliff mouth, stroking Dahei's head with both hands. Lao Meng had just told him specifically that Dahei had gone into the mountains with someone's dog again.

"Dahei, although February and March are the seasons when female dogs are busy looking for partners, and many female dogs ask you for help, no matter how willing you are to help the dogs, you have to consider your own health. You can't serve them like this. I insisted on bringing you here because I wanted you to stay with me and gain some weight. It's great. You've been busy every day for more than a month, and you're much thinner than when you were in Zhongping."

When Xie Hushan led the team to the cliff mouth, he insisted on bringing Dahei with him. However, Dahei refused to show his face to him. He praised Dahei like a flower in front of Lao Jin, Taozi and others, saying that he understood human nature, was very kind and righteous, and could be called a loyal dog. As a result...

The gangster Liu Jinsuo from the old Liu family at Yakou was defeated, and no one harmed women anymore. Dahei was a seamless success, and had a very good relationship with the bitches from several nearby brigades. He could be called the Liu Jinsuo among dogs.

This caused everyone at the cliff to speculate whether Liu Jinsuo was reincarnated as Dahei.

While Xie Hushan was lazily petting his dog, Han Hongzhen, who had made significant progress over the past month, was receiving brick buyers from various brigades in a simple office not far away built with blue bricks from the first kiln:
"It takes at least a week to load 30,000 bricks into one kiln, from cutting the mud to firing it. There are only three kilns in total. It's not that I'm being lenient, it's just that they are fully booked. The earliest it will take is next month. If you place an order, I will schedule it for you, otherwise you can go ask someone else."

Farther away, in front of a large brick kiln that looked like a steamed bun, Ma Saner, Chen Daxixi and others followed Master Luo along the steep slope into the kiln, checking whether the workers at the cliff mouth were lazy when loading the kiln, and preparing for the next kiln firing.

This time, Master Luo will not fire the kiln himself, but will let his apprentices who have been learning with him for more than a month to do the actual work.

Firing the kiln is the most technically demanding step in the process of firing green bricks. It requires watching the temperature, judging the approximate temperature inside the kiln by the color of the flame, and then estimating whether the temperature is too high or too low for the brick kiln at that moment. If it is too low, the bricks cannot be burned through, and if it is too high, it consumes firewood and causes unnecessary waste.

It is also necessary to tell the workers the specific time to close the kiln based on the temperature of the fire, so that they know how long they have to keep firing before closing the kiln and filling the kiln with water. This way, the bricks in the kiln can react chemically with the water at the optimal temperature, turning the gray-red color of the bricks into an ancient indigo color.

In the open yard, dozens of migrant workers from Yakou were skillfully using mud piles to remove bricks from the brickyard. Although none of the physical tasks in the brickyard were easy, removing bricks from the brickyard was the most tiring one.

Because Xie Hushan set a quota for them, two people shared a brick mold, and they had to produce at least 1,600 bricks per day with one brick mold to meet the quota and be eligible to receive the subsidy.

Stripping the mold requires mastering a skill, and it can be very efficient once you become proficient at it. However, it is a semi-skilled job that can easily get you exhausted and not be able to do well for a novice who has just started.

When Ma Laowu came to inspect, he boasted that he had peeled mud bricks when building a house, and he went out of his way to experience it for about half an hour. After the experience, he never mentioned the matter of asking other people from Team 3 to come here to work and earn money.

In his words, as long as the family has enough food to eat, no one can endure such hardship. This is not a job for human beings. No wonder Xie Hushan said that people are being treated like animals.

Not only is it very tiring, it also requires skills. You have to spread dust, dig mud, make mud into round pieces, wrench the buckets, and scrape the mud all in one go. When lifting the mold to take out the bricks, you have to pay attention to the speed and order. The side close to the ground needs to be quickly buckled and the mold needs to be lifted slowly. After the bricks are dried until they can be removed, they need to be smoothed. After they can be lifted, the sides of the bricks need to be polished again.

Today, there are sixty people from Yakou doing this exhausting work in the brickyard. Not only do they not complain about being tired, but other members of the Yakou community who were not selected are full of envy and jealousy towards them.

Because these sixty people could see the money, as long as they completed a certain amount of work every day, Xie Hushan would ask Jin Mancang to give them a subsidy of 1.5 cents and would never delay the payment.

When Xie Hushan was building the kilns, he insisted on building three at the same time. Both the Lingguanying Commune and the Zhongping Commune disagreed, thinking that Xie Hushan was taking an over-step. They just built a mound of earth and tried to burn a few hundred pieces. Now after seeing Luo Laodao's craftsmanship, he wanted to build three large kilns right away?
Both communes agreed that they should build one first to give it a try.

It was Yang Liming who helped Xie Hushan to bear the pressure and did ideological work in the two communes, helping Xie Hushan to build three kilns. After they were built, the two communes realized that Xie Hushan was not being reckless, but had guessed that as long as he made money, other communes would come to snatch his business.

After seeing that the first kiln of bricks in the brickyard made money, in the past half month, all the communes and brigades in Bingyang that used to burn red bricks began to try to learn from Yakou to open kilns and burn green bricks. There was an endless stream of "spies" coming here to inquire about information and try to steal secrets.

There are even many teams that hire skilled people to open kilns directly, but only a few of them can make money in the end.

First, they all used one kiln, which could produce a maximum of 30,000 bricks, and the workers were all members of their own production team who were mobilized to do voluntary labor to earn work points. After a kiln of finished bricks were fired, they could not wait to sell them to others because the members of the production team, who were in a hurry to build houses, would rush to buy the bricks at the team's preferential price for their own use.

This also resulted in the situation that after working hard for a month, the bricks produced in the kilns were not sold at all. They were all distributed among the members within the production team. The members who did the heavy work did not receive any additional subsidies, and had no motivation to continue doing high-intensity and heavy physical work every day, such as mixing mud, removing blanks, loading kilns, and unloading kilns.

It's not that the production team didn't want to provide subsidies, but the bricks from several kilns were sold to members of the same team at internal prices, and they didn't make any profit to provide subsidies to the members, so they had to replace another group of members to do the work. The new members had to familiarize themselves with techniques such as removing the bricks from the kilns again. After several cycles of this, morale became a problem, and the members' sarcastic remarks increased. Even if they invited a kiln master who was better than Luo Laodao to give them advice, the brick kiln could not be operated normally.

Second, they did not have a stable firewood channel like Xie Hushan. The army forestry farm still remembered Luo Laodao's kindness in helping the Eighth Route Army and the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces during the Anti-Japanese War.

When he heard Taoist Luo asking for firewood, he immediately said that there was no need for Xie Hushan and his team to send people to repair the branches. The forest soldiers would be responsible for the repairs, and Xie Hushan and his team only needed to arrange a truck to transport them back.

Moreover, this batch of firewood was kept as a backup. Xie Hushan used money to order firewood from other production brigades in the area. Priority was given to burning the firewood sold to the brick factory by the brigades. When the supply was tight, the firewood provided free of charge by the army forest farm was burned to ensure that the brick factory always had sufficient fuel.

Third, relying on the threefold production capacity, his brickyard has now created a brand effect in all communes and brigades. People are willing to buy blue bricks not from any brick kiln, but have all recognized the blue bricks fired by the Yakou brickyard.

Xie Hushan insisted on building three brick kilns, each of which can produce 30,000 green bricks. The three kilns can provide a stable supply of 90,000 bricks a week. The red clay used is of good quality, and the bricks fired are better than the machine-made red bricks from large brick factories in terms of hardness, weathering resistance, corrosion resistance and other qualities.

After all, the ancient brick-firing technology that Luo Laodao mastered is a firing technology that has been used in China for thousands of years. Good blue bricks can indeed withstand hundreds of years of wind and frost without breaking or cracking.

The bricks are of good quality, but the price is the same as the red bricks from big brick factories, three cents a piece, with a starting price of one thousand yuan.

The current orders have been scheduled until next month. Even if the brickyard is closed next month, he has already earned 5,400 yuan from the orders in this half month and next month. After deducting the expenses of labor, firewood, and firewood shipping for this month and a half, there will be no problem in making a net profit of 2,000 yuan.

He didn't dare tell Ma Laowu the truth, for fear that Ma Laowu would faint on the spot. He only said that he could earn about a thousand yuan, and this was enough to make Ma Laowu so happy that he jumped all the way back to Zhongping.

As for the future father-in-law Jin Mancang, this is the advantage of finding an accountant who is illiterate and honest. Uncle Jin focuses on paying 1.5 cents to each of the people working at the cliff every day. As for how much money the brickyard makes, he has never thought about it.

But Xie Hushan told Lao Jiang and Jin Mancang that the work of sixty people in the Yakou Brigade for one and a half months had earned the Yakou Production Brigade 1,080 yuan in cash.

If necessary, Xie Hushan could pay them the money first, let their production team buy carts and livestock, and then help pull bricks or transport firewood to continue making money.

Lao Jiang is now traveling around the world looking for livestock and carts at suitable prices in preparation for expanding his side business.

After he made money, there were some people who came looking for him out of jealousy, but when they found out that the person in charge of the brickyard was the father of the three Liu family members who had killed them, they immediately ran away.

"Third brother, it's time to eat!" Taozi was carrying a basket of rice, Jin Laosan was carrying a small dining table, and Er Taoer was carrying four small stools in both hands as they walked over from outside the brickyard. Before they got close, Jin Laosan shouted loudly to Xie Hushan.

Jin Laosan put the small dining table on the table first, then Er Taoer placed the stools in his hands around the table, and Taozi walked at the end.

Er Taoer waited for the dining table and benches to be set up, then squatted down next to Xie Hushan, stretched out her hand to him, with an intimate smile on her face:
"Third brother, meal money."

Xie Hushan took out fifty cents, Er Taoer put it away and looked at his sister:

"Sister, Third Brother has given the money for the meal, hurry up and serve the food!"

Taozi had also come over at this time, took out the lunch from the basket and put it on the table, and said to Xie Hushan:

"I was too busy with work today and didn't have time to cook for you. Just make do with it. I'll make you something special tomorrow." As she spoke, she took out from the basket a three-liang white porcelain wine warmer with a wine cup on top, an aluminum lunch box full of braised steamed buns, and two mixed flour steamed buns.

Taozi helped the Yakou Production Team 2 open a braised pork stall, laundry and sewing stall. Xie Hushan originally wanted Taozi to be in charge of the tailoring stall and Han Hongzhen to be in charge of the braised pork stall, but since Han Hongzhen arrived, Xie Hushan has asked her to manage the workers and also have to cook for the eleven militiamen part-time. After all, it is too luxurious to let the militiamen eat braised pork three meals a day, so it is more cost-effective to use the food sent by the Zhongping Team 3 to cook for these gluttons.

Han Hongzhen really didn't have time to set up a stall with Taozi, so Taozi simply took charge of the work of both stalls.

Taozi had previously worked in the team helping the people in Xishan who were breaking stones to do sewing and mending to earn some money. The job of stewing does not require any technical skills, and with the help of Ertaoer and Jin Laosan, it is not too hard.

However, the braised pork business is not as good as imagined. The main consumers are Xie Hushan and people from other villages and bricklayers who come to the brickyard to buy bricks and transport them. The local people in Yakou cannot afford it.

Before, Ma Laowu, thinking of Xie Hushan's hard work in earning money for the team at Yakou, specially approved a 50-cent daily food allowance for Xie Hushan, the team leader of the sideline group. Xie Hushan then used this money as a subsidy for Taozi's meals and room and board.

"What do you want to eat when you get home tonight?" Taozi sat on a small stool, wiped the chopsticks clean and handed them to Xie Hushan, then poured a cup of wine for Xie Hushan, handed it to him, and asked with a smile.

During this period, Xie Hushan did not sleep in the shack with others. He went to Jin Mancang's house on time after get off work to sleep on the kang.

He occupied one room by himself, while Taozi, Han Hongzhen, Ertao, Biaozi and Li Qiaozhi shared another room. The head of the household, Lao Jin, and Sanpang'er could only stay at their neighbor Lao Jiang's house.

Lao Jiang had no complaints about this at all. In his opinion, it was much safer for Lao Jin to stay at his house than for Xie Hushan, his living father, to stay at his house.

"I think..." Just as Xie Hushan was about to speak, with his master's airs, he picked up his wine cup and was about to speak, when Han Hongbing, who had asked for leave to return to Zhongping two days ago, came over in a dusty state. It seemed that he had ridden Accountant Zhao's bicycle all the way here since morning. He shouted excitedly while pedaling his bicycle:

"Xie Siling! The master called. We will report to the County Animal Husbandry Bureau at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning! The training will last for three days, and we will board the bus and leave after the training! He told us to go home and pack up! Brother, you are so nice to come here so early in the morning to inform you!"

"Have you ever thought about going to the commune to find Lao Yang and ask him to call Lingguanying Commune to inform me?" Xie Hushan asked his question while looking at Han Hongbing, whose head was puffs of white smoke.

Han Hongbing's originally excited expression suddenly became dull and he opened his mouth.

"Chief of Staff Han obviously rode here specially to pick you up, but you don't appreciate his kindness. You just speak angry words and make fun of him." Taozi smiled and helped Han Hongbing to save face.

"Sister-in-law, to be honest, I was so excited that I forgot to call. Otherwise, I wouldn't have come. It's seventy miles, so tiring." Han Hongbing wiped the sweat from his face from pedaling, sat on the bicycle, patted his chest and said to Taozi:

"But, since you're trying to save my life, I will definitely remember your kindness. I won't say anything more. I promise to keep an eye on Xie Siling for you. If any shabby old woman wants to snatch the position of commander's wife from you, I, the chief of staff, will be the first to help you get rid of her!"

He even pointed at Xie Hushan:

"Even if you want to kill Xie Siling one day, I will be there to sharpen your knife for you!"

Lao Meng had just finished loading a truckload of bricks for someone else and came over to drink some water and catch his breath. When he heard what Han Hongbing said, he curiously asked Xie Hushan a question:

"Xie Siling, how come everyone in our team, except me, wants to castrate you in place of your wife? Is it because the morale of the team has been weakened and it's difficult to lead the team?"

"You are all traitors with rebellious minds. You are the only one who is loyal to me." Xie Hushan said to Lao Meng with emotion:
"Time will tell, and it's you who will be the real hero. I've figured it out. From now on, our team will have to rely on you and Dahei."

Taozi laughed out loud. Indeed, she had won over several of Xie Hushan's close friends, but only Lao Meng remained loyal to Xie Hushan.

Lao Meng’s attitude is, I will eat if you give me food, I will nod to whatever you say before eating, and after eating, you can say whatever you want, I will just wipe my mouth and leave.

There were only two people in the entire brickyard who could get through to Lao Meng. One of them was Xie Hushan, his childhood playmate and his commander-in-chief.

The other one is Han Hongzhen. They used to go to the market together and set up a stall. Every day, Han Hongzhen would give the first bowl of braised pork to Lao Meng first. She fed her for half a year and they have a deep relationship.

"Or, let your wife lead the team, or your fourth sister can lead it, and Dahei and I will set up our own faction with you. Now the team is full of traitors, and the situation is too dangerous. We don't know when they will rebel." Lao Meng thought about it seriously and gave his opinions and suggestions as the deputy commander.

"You have done evil things and are unpopular, so you deserve what you have done, Xie Siling!" Han Hongbing laughed out loud after hearing what Lao Meng said, and rode his bicycle to find Chen Daxi and others to show off.

After hearing what Lao Meng said, Xie Hushan also laughed, drank the wine in the cup, and then called the fat boy next to him:
"Sanpang'er, share the food on the table with Lao Meng. Third brother is leaving!"

"Third brother, are you coming back?" Taozi looked at Xie Hushan and asked calmly.

Xie Hushan never told her why he acted so arrogantly, but Taozi had thought of various answers herself.

Without even seeing the appearance of the girl he was going on a blind date, Xie Hushan acted cool and deliberately hoped that she would not like him. This shows that he did not dislike himself, but that he did not want to find a partner at all.

Taozi even thought that Xie Hushan might have a lover, but after being together for so long, she didn't find any signs. Han Hongzhen didn't seem like his lover. The most suspicious person was Lao Yang. If Lao Yang was a woman, then everything would make sense, but Lao Yang was a man.

It was not until she learned that Xie Hushan was going to send cattle to Hong Kong that Taozi vaguely thought of a possibility.

Could it be that the third brother didn't want to stay in Zhongping and was looking for an opportunity to go out and see the world?

That's what grandma said, he is too wild.

Her grandmother told her that men should be tied up with a rope so that they don't have to worry about their family and can go out without worry, but they also have to remember to think about their family and come back.

But the tricks that grandma taught her seemed to be of no use to Xie Hushan. Every time he didn't do what grandma said.

Since she couldn't think of it, she might as well ask directly. So when she learned that Xie Hushan was leaving in three days, Taozi just asked.

Xie Hushan put down his wine cup, took out his cigarette case, lit it with a match, took a puff, and then laughed:

"Where would I go if I don't come back? Hong Kong Island is not my home."

He cast his gaze towards the busy figures in the brickyard, and finally looked at Taozi:
"So many people are waiting for me, aren't you waiting to cook for me? I'll think about it on the way and tell you what I want to eat when I come back, and then you can cook it for me."

(End of this chapter)