Joey and Tammy threw down their tools and came over and stood behind Reivers and MacGregor who came up dragging a loaded sledge behind them.
“Take that load down yonder!” ordered Moir, pointing to the black tunnel into which the creek disappeared in leaving the cavern.
Tammy and Joey followed, grinning, two paces behind the sledge. Moir, gun in hand, walked ten feet behind them.
“Whoa!” he laughed when Reivers and MacGregor had drawn up against the cliff beside the stream’s exit. “You can unhitch tuh old jackass now, ma sons. Then over with it quick.”
With a yelp Tammy and Joey tore loose MacGregor’s traces. They held him between them, and in his bound and weakened condition he was unable to struggle or turn around.
Before Reivers could move they had hurled MacGregor into the deep water in the tunnel. He sank like a stone and the current sucked him in.
“Good-by, MacGregor of the big boasts!” laughed Moir, but he laughed a trifle too soon.
In the instant that the current bore MacGregor into the darkness of the tunnel his face bobbed up above the waters. He looked up, and looked straight into Reivers’s eyes. It was not a look of appeal; it was the same look that had been in the eyes of Hattie MacGregor the day when Reivers had left her cabin.
Then Hell-Camp Reivers felt himself going mad. He hit Tammy so hard and true that he flew through the air and struck against Moir. The next instant Reivers was diving like a flash into the black water, groping for MacGregor, while the current swept him into the total darkness.
He heard the bullet from Moir’s revolver strike the water behind him in the instant that his hands found MacGregor; heard mocking laughter as he pulled the old man’s head above water; then the current whirled him and his burden away. It whisked him downstream with a power irresistible. It threw him from side to side against the ragged rock walls. It sucked him and the load he bore down in deep whirlpools and spewed them up again.