And so the men of Hell Camp, drunk with the spirit and success of their revolt, cried out in triumph. Their cry rose over the roar of flame. It rang above the rumble of crunching ice. It reached, pæan-like, up through the star-filled northern night—a cry of victory, of gratification, the old, terrible cry of the kill.
For the Snow-Burner was gone. Wolf-like he had harried them and wolf-like he had died. No man, not even Hell-Camp Reivers, they knew, could live a minute in that black water. They had seen the waters close above him; a floe of ice swept serenely over the spot where he had gone down. He was gone. The world was rid of him.
And so the men of Cameron-Dam Camp, while their cry still echoed in the timber, turned to carry the news of the Snow-Burner’s end back to the men who were milling about the burning camp. The Snow-Burner was dead!
Out in the deadly river, Hell-Camp Reivers stayed under water until he knew that the men on the bank counted him drowned. He had sought the open water deliberately, his giant lungs filling themselves with air as he plunged down to the superhuman test which was to spell life or death for him.
He realised that if he were to live he must appear to perish in the river, before the eyes of the men who pursued him. To have won through the open water, and over the ice beyond, and in their sight have reached the farther shore would have sealed his doom as surely as to have returned to the bank where stood the men.
The camp had revolted. Two hundred men had said that he must die; and had he been seen to cross the river and enter the timber beyond, half of the two hundred, properly armed, would have crossed the stringers of the dam, not to pause or rest until they had hunted him down. He was without weapons of any kind save his bare fists. He was bleeding heavily from the bullet-hole in his right shoulder. He would have died like a wounded wolf run to earth had he been seen to cross the river safely. His only chance for life was to appear to die in the river.
He made no fight as he went down. The swift waters sucked him under like a straw. They rolled him over the rocky bottom, whirled him around and around sunken piles of ice. Into the sluice-like current of the stream’s middle they spewed him, and the current caught him and shot him into the darkness below the glare of the burning camp.
He lay inert in the water’s grasp, recking not how the sharp ice gashed and tore face and hands, how the rocks crushed and bruised his body. A sweeping ice-floe caught him and held him down. Like some great river-beast he lay supine beneath it, conserving every atom of his giant’s strength for the test that was to win him life.
Then, with the blood roaring in his temples, and his bursting lungs warning him that the next second must yield him air or death, he threw his body upward against the ice, felt it slip to one side, thrust his upturned face out of the water, caught a finger-hold on another floe that strove to thrust him down, gasped, clawed and—laughed.
He was a dead man, and he lived. Men had driven him into the jaws of death, and death had engulfed and apparently swallowed him. Men counted him now as one who had gone hence. Far and wide the word would be flung in a hurry: the Snow-Burner was no more; Hell-Camp Reivers had passed away.