He bumped his head against the stone roof of the tunnel and swore. The roof was a scant foot above the water. He put his hand up. The roof was getting closer to the water with every yard. Soon there was only room for their upturned faces above the water.
Reivers laughed heartily. So this was to be the end! The joke was on him. After all he had gone through, he was to drown like a silly fool through a fool’s impulse.
Presently roof and water came together. For a moment Reivers fought with his vast strength, holding his own for an instant against the current, hanging on to the last few seconds of life with a fury of effort. The current proved too strong. It sucked them under; the water closed above them. They were whirled and buffeted to the last breath of life in them, and then suddenly their heads slipped above water and they were looking straight up at the gray Winter sky.
CHAPTER XLV—A SURPRISE FOR SHANTY MOIR
Reivers caught hold of a spear of rock the instant his head came out of water, and held on. He did not try to think or understand at first. Sufficient to know that he was alive and to pump his lungs full of the air they were crying for. He held MacGregor under his left arm, and he rather wondered that he hadn’t let him go in that moment when he went under. MacGregor was beginning to revive, too. Reivers looked around.
There was not much to see. They were in a tiny opening in the rocks, a yard or two in length. It was a duplicate of Moir’s cavern on a miniature scale, except that here the rock walls were not high or impossible to climb. For this space the brook showed itself once more to the sun, then vanished again under the cliffs.
“Is it Heaven?” gasped MacGregor, only half conscious.
“Nearer hell,” laughed Reivers.
He lifted himself and his burden out of the water to a resting-place on a shelf of rock. For a minute or two he sat looking up at the rock walls and the grey sky above them. He looked down at the water, at the spot where they had been spewed from death back into life. And then he leaped upright and laughed, laughed so that the rocks rang with it, laughed so that MacGregor’s senses cleared and he looked at his saviour in consternation. His laughter was the uncontrollable, heart-free laughter of the man who suddenly sees a great joke upon his enemy.
He smote MacGregor between the shoulder-blades so he gasped and coughed. He tore the straps and harness from his arms, body and legs, tossed him up in the air, shook him and set him down on the rock.