The face of the Snow-Burner as it rode barely above the icy, lapping waters, bore but one single expression, a sardonic appreciation of the joke he had played upon men and Death. The loss of Cameron Camp, of his position, of all that he called his own did not trouble him.
As the current swept him down there, he was a beaten man, stripped of all the things that men struggle for to have and to hold, and with but a slippery finger-hold on life itself. Yet he was victorious, triumphant.
He had placed himself within the clammy fingers of the River Death. The fingers had closed upon him, and he had torn them apart, had thrust death away, had clutched life as it fleeted from him and had drawn it back to hold for the time being. And Reivers laughed contemptuously, tauntingly, at the sucking waters cheated of their prey.
“Not yet, Nick, old boy,” he muttered. “It doesn’t please me to boss your stokers just yet.”
The current tore the ice from his precarious grip and he was forced to swim for it. In the darkness he struck the grinding icefield on the far side of the open water, and like the claws of a bear his stiffening fingers sought for and found a crevice to afford a secure hold.
A pull, a heave and a wriggle, and he lay face-down on the jagged ice—heart, lungs and brain crying for the cold air which he sucked in avidly. The ice-cakes parted beneath his weight. Once more he fought through the water to a resting place on the ice; once more the treacherous ice parted and dropped him into the water.
Swimming, crawling, wriggling his way, he fought on. At last an outstretched hand groped to a hold on a snow-covered root on the far bank of the river.
“About time,” he said and, slowly drawing himself up onto the bank, he rolled over in the snow and lay with his face turned back toward Cameron Camp.
The fire which the men had started in the long bunk-house when they had revolted against the inhumanity of Reivers now had gained full headway. In pitchy, red billows of flame the dried log walls were roaring upward into the night. Like the yipping of maddened demons, the bellowing shouts of the men came back to him as they danced and leaped around the fire in celebration of the passing of Reivers and of the camp for which his treatment of men had justly earned the title of Hell-Camp.
But louder and more poignant even than the roar of flame and the shouts of jubilant men, there came to Reivers’ ears a sound which prompted him to drag himself to an elbow to listen. Somewhere out in the timber near the camp a man was crying for mercy. A rifle cracked; the pleading stopped. Reivers smiled contemptuously.