Chapter XXII: The Cheating of the River

"It's got him! The river's got him. He's drowned! 'Hell-Camp' Reivers--he's gone. He's done for. The 'Snow-Burner' is dead, dead dead!"

Like wolves in revolt the men of "Hell Camp" lined the bank of the rushing, ice-choked river and cursed and roared into the blackness of the night. Behind them the buildings of the camp, scene of the Snow-Burner's inhuman brutality and dominance over the lives of men, were going up in seas of flame which they had started.

Before them the tumultuous river, the waters battling the ice which strove to cover it, tossed black and white under the red glow of tumbling fire. And somewhere out in the murderous current, whirled and sucked down by the rushing water, buffeted and crushed by the grinding ice, a bullet-hole through his shoulder, was all that was left of the man whose life they had cried for.

The river had cheated them. Like panting wolves, their hands outstretched claw-like to clutch and kill, they had pursued him closely to the river's edge. A cry of rage, short, sharp, unreasoning, had leaped from their throats as Reivers, staggering from his wound, had leaped unhesitatingly out on to the heaving cakes of ice.

Spellbound, open-mouthed and silent, they had stood and watched as their erstwhile oppressor ran zigzagging, leaping from cake to cake, out toward the black slip of open water which ran silently, swiftly in the river's middle. And then they had cried out again.

For the open water had caught him. Straight into it, without pausing or swerving, Reivers had run on. And the black water had taken him home. Like a stone dropped into its midst, it had taken him plump--a flirt of spray, a gurgle. Then the waters rushed on as before, silent, deadly, unconcerned.

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.

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.

"One of the guards; they got him," he mused. "The fool! That's what he gets for being silly enough to be faithful to me."

But the fate of the guard, one of the "shot-gun artists" who had served him faithfully and brutally in the task of keeping the men of the camp helpless under his heel, roused Reivers to the need of quick action. If the guards had escaped into the woods and were being hunted down by the maddened crew, the hunt might easily lead across the dam and up the bank to where he lay. Once let it be known that he had not perished in the river, and the whole camp would come swarming across the dam, each man's hand against him, resolved to take his trail and hunt him down, no matter where the trail might lead or how long the hunt might take.

The fight through the river ice was but the preliminary to his flight for safety. Many miles of cold trail between him and the burning camp were his most urgent present needs, and with a curse he staggered to his feet and stood for a moment lowering back across the water to the scene of his overthrow.

To a lesser man--or a better man--there would have been deep humiliation in the situation. Reivers's mind flashed back over the incidents of the last few hours. Over there, across the river, he had been beaten for the first time in his life in a fair, stand-up fist fight. He had underestimated young Treplin, and Treplin had beaten him.

Following his defeat had come the revolt of the men. Following that had come flight. The power and leadership of the camp had been wrested from his hands by a better man; he himself had been driven out, helpless, beaten, yet Reivers only laughed as he stood now and looked back across the river. For in the river the Snow-Burner had died.

The past was dead. A new life was beginning for him. It had to be so, for if word went back that the Snow-Burner was still alive the men of Cameron-Dam Camp would come clamouring to the hunt. To die, and yet to live; to slough one life, as an old coat, and to take up another, not having the slightest notion of what it might hold--that was the great adventure, that was something so interesting that the humiliation of defeat never so much as reached beneath Reivers' skin.

He stood for a moment, looking back at the camp, and he smiled. He waved his left hand in a polished gesture of contemptuous farewell.

"Good-by, Mr. Hell-Camp Reivers," he growled. "Hello, Mr. New Man, whoever you are. Let's go and lay up till the puncture in your hide heals. Then we'll go out and see what you can do to this silly old world."

With his fingers clutching the hole in his shoulder, he turned and lurched drunkenly away into the blackness of the thick timber.

The icy waters of the river had been kind to him in more ways than one. They had congealed the warm blood-spurts from his wound into a solid red clot, and his thick woolen shirt and mackinaw were frozen stiff and tight against the clot.

He held to his staggering run for an hour, seeking bare spots in the timber, travelling on top of windfalls when he found them, hiding his trail in uncanny fashion, before his body grew warm enough to thaw the icy bandages. Then he halted and, by the light of the cold moon, bared his shoulder and took stock. It was a bad, ragged wound. He moved the shoulder and smiled sardonically as he noted that no bone was touched.

From the butt of a shattered windfall he tore a flat sliver of clean pine. With his teeth he worried it down to a proper size, and with handkerchief and belt he bound it over the wound so tightly that it sunk deep into the muscles of the shoulder. It chafed and cut the skin and started the blood in half a dozen places, but he pulled the belt up another hole despite the inclination to grimace from pain.

"Suffer, Body," he muttered, "suffer all you please. You've nothing to say about this. Your job for the present is merely to serve life by keeping it going. Later on you may grow whole again. I shall need you."

He buttoned his mackinaw with difficulty and, finding an open space, turned and took his bearings. Far behind him a dull red glow on the sky marked the location of Cameron-Dam Camp. From this he turned, carefully scanning the heavens, until above the top of the timber he caught the weird glint of the northern lights. That way lay his course.

The white man's country stopped with the timber in which he stood. Beyond was Indian country, the bleak, barren Dead Lands, a wilderness too bare of timber to tempt the logger, a land of ridge upon ridge of ragged rock, unexplored by white man, save for a rare mining prospector, and uninhabited save for the half-starved camp of the people of Tillie, the Chippewa, Reivers' slave, by the power of the love she bore him.

White men shunned the white wastes of the Dead Lands as, in warmer climes, they shun the unwatered sands of the desert. That was why Reivers sought it. Out there in the camp of Tillie's people he could lie safe, well fed, well nursed, until his wound healed and the strength of his body came back to him. And then....

"Cheer up, Body!" he chuckled as he started northward. "We'll make the world pay bitterly for all of this when we're in shape again. For the present we're going north, going north, going north. You can't stop, Body; you can't lay down. Groan all you want to. You're going to be dragged just as far to-night as if you weren't shot up at all."