“Ah, Reivers!” he murmured. “Ye great man gone wrong! How goes it with ye now, Reivers? Can ye win through? Can ye? I wonder—I wonder!”
And as Toppy and Helen, holding closely to one another, entered the office building, the old man hastened to join the throng by the river where the fate of the Snow-Burner was being spun.
PART TWO: THE SUPER MAN
CHAPTER XXII—THE CHEATING OF THE RIVER
“It’s got him! The river’s got him. He’s drowned! ‘Hell-Camp’ Reivers—he’s gone. He’s done for. The ‘Snow-Burner’ is dead, dead dead!”
Like wolves in revolt the men of “Hell Camp” lined the bank of the rushing, ice-choked river and cursed and roared into the blackness of the night. Behind them the buildings of the camp, scene of the Snow-Burner’s inhuman brutality and dominance over the lives of men, were going up in seas of flame which they had started.
Before them the tumultuous river, the waters battling the ice which strove to cover it, tossed black and white under the red glow of tumbling fire. And somewhere out in the murderous current, whirled and sucked down by the rushing water, buffeted and crushed by the grinding ice, a bullet-hole through his shoulder, was all that was left of the man whose life they had cried for.
The river had cheated them. Like panting wolves, their hands outstretched claw-like to clutch and kill, they had pursued him closely to the river’s edge. A cry of rage, short, sharp, unreasoning, had leaped from their throats as Reivers, staggering from his wound, had leaped unhesitatingly out on to the heaving cakes of ice.
Spellbound, open-mouthed and silent, they had stood and watched as their erstwhile oppressor ran zigzagging, leaping from cake to cake, out toward the black slip of open water which ran silently, swiftly in the river’s middle. And then they had cried out again.
For the open water had caught him. Straight into it, without pausing or swerving, Reivers had run on. And the black water had taken him home. Like a stone dropped into its midst, it had taken him plump—a flirt of spray, a gurgle. Then the waters rushed on as before, silent, deadly, unconcerned.