"Great Scott, Jim, come here! What is that?"
"That" to which Corbett's pointing finger called attention was a strange upright mass of ice, which came riding towards them upon a little floe, a floe which later on was caught and whirled round and round in a backwater of the river just below the cabin.
"A tree, ain't it, Steve?" said Jim, appealing to Chance, who had followed him out. "A tree, I reckon, Ned, as has got wedged in somehow among the drift."
"Yes, I guess it's a tree," Steve assented. "But what with the mist and the way the thing dances around, it's mighty hard to tell what it is."
"Well, I'm getting as full of fancies as a woman," said Ned, "but I could have sworn when I saw it first, that that thing was a man."
"A man? By heaven, it is a man!" yelled Jim. "Look, look!" and with white, scared face he stared at the thing as it came circling round again in the endless, meaningless dance of the drift through the mist.
"If it's a man, it is no good standing here," said Corbett quickly. "Bear a hand to drag him ashore." And snatching a rope from the inside of the hut, he sprang down the steep bank to the shore, though the faces of his followers showed plainly enough that, terrible as dead men always are to the living, there was something about this river-waif which made him a horror greater even than the dead who die on land.
By some strange chance the body (for it was a body) had got jammed between two pieces of drift in such a manner that it stood upright, waist-high above the flood, bowing and curtseying with every movement of the water, but so coated with ice that, but for its general outline and a rag of clothing which still fluttered from it, none could have guessed its nature.
For a moment Corbett feared that it would break out of the backwater, and be whirled down the stream before he could get his rope over it; but no, the stream had not done with its plaything yet. The winter would be a long one, and what matter if this wayfarer by the Frazer tarried even a day and a night in the backwater? The rocks had stayed there for hundreds of years. There was no hurry about such things. Round and round in the same order came the hummocks, a bit of a wrecked canoe on one, on the next only the wreck of a man. Round and round whirled the long loop of Corbett's lariat, until the silent rider came bowing past him within his reach. Then the rope flew out, and the long loop poised and settled silently about the rider's neck. Quick as thought Ned was jerked upon his knees, and for a moment it seemed as if the angry river would suck him in and add him to the number of its ghastly dancers. But Ned was young and strong and loved life, so that he stayed himself against a great boulder and called aloud for help.
"Hold on to the rope!" he yelled to his comrade. "The thing fights like a salmon!"