With the end almost in sight, the boys heard a distant shout, and looking north of them, saw four men bearing down the slope.
“The police! The police!” cried Dick, as he got to his feet and began shouting and waving to them.
Two of the four men ran toward the struggling outlaws, but they were too late to stop the impending tragedy. Moonshine Sam’s knife found its mark, and he arose, shaking the snow from his clothes, leaving a still form in the snow.
It was not until then that the victorious outlaw discovered the two policemen descending upon him. With a startled shout, he started to run away, then aware that he could never get away alive, he shook his fists defiantly at his pursuers, and with a hoarse yell, plunged his knife into his own breast.
“He’s beaten the law!” exclaimed Dick, horrified by this grim justice of the frozen north. “Come on, Sandy, let’s go down and join the policemen.”
They found Corporals McCarthy and Thalman inspecting the two silent forms on the tundra when they arrived on the scene of the battle. Both outlaws were dead beyond a shadow of doubt.
“Well,” Corporal McCarthy looked up from the silent face of Mistak, “the game is over, and for once, the mounted got licked—but it took death to do it,” he concluded grimly, briefly ordering that two graves should be hollowed out in the snow, and the bodies interred.
Dick and Sandy found a little later, that the two who had accompanied the Corporals were the last of Mistak’s band, an Indian and an Eskimo—both with their hands tied behind them. The corporals explained that they had run across them starving in an igloo, after they had deserted Mistak. The outlaws had given up without a struggle, morosely accepting a fate they considered less terrible than that which the awful northland might have dealt out to them.
Though the shadow of the recent tragedy darkened their spirits, it was an infinitely relieved party that set out on the trail back to the supply base. With every step that carried them further from those still forms in their snow graves, their hearts grew lighter.
On the way back they sighted Constable Sloan and Sipsa, and hailed them with the tragic news. The two joined them on the return journey, and already the talk was of the trip back to God’s country in the spring.