The Snow-Burner

“First blood!”

Then Toppy spat out the blood he had held in after Reivers’ blow. The feel of the blood running down his face turned Reivers to a fury. He rushed with an impetuosity which nothing could withstand, his fists playing a tattoo on Toppy’s head and body. Like a tiger Toppy fought back; but Reivers’ rage for the moment had given him added strength. He fought as a man who intends to end a fight in a hurry; he rushed and struck with power to annihilate with one blow, and rushed and struck again.

Toppy was pressed back. A groan came from the crowd as they saw him stagger from a blow on the jaw and saw Reivers set himself for one last desperate effort. Reivers rushed, his face the face of a demon, his left ripping up for the body, his right looping overhand in a killing swing at the head; and then the crowd gasped, for Toppy, with his superior quickness of foot, side-stepped and as Reivers plunged past dealt him a left in the mouth that flung him half around and sent him staggering against the outheld hands of the crowd.

When Reivers turned around now he was bleeding from the mouth also, and in his eyes was a look of caution that Toppy had never seen there before.

The fight now became as dogged as it was furious. Each man had tried to end it with a single and, failing, knew that he must wear his opponent down. Neither had been seriously damaged by the blows struck and neither was in the least tired. The thud of blow followed blow. Back and forth the pair shuffled, first one driving the other with volleys of punches, then his antagonist suddenly turning the tables.

Toppy, feeling that he was fighting an uphill fight, saved himself more than Reivers. The latter, who felt himself the master, became more and more enraged as Toppy continued to stand up before him and give him back as good as he gave. Each time that Toppy reached face or body with a solid blow the savage fury flared in Reivers’ eyes, and he lunged forward like a maddened bull. Always, however, he recovered himself and resumed the fight with brains as well as brawn.

Toppy never lost his head after the first wild spasm. He realised that they were so evenly matched that the loser would lose by a slip of the mind by letting some weak spot in his character master him; and he held himself in with an iron will. Reivers’ blows goaded and tempted him to rush in madly, but he held back. The men about the ring thought he was losing, and their voices rose in growled encouragement.

Toppy was not losing. As he saw Reivers become more and more furious his hopes began to rise. At each opportunity he reached Reivers’ face, cutting open his other eye, bringing the blood from his nose, stinging him into added furies. Toppy was knocked down several times in the rushes that invariably followed such blows, but each time he recovered himself before Reivers could rush upon him. Suddenly his fighting-instinct telegraphed him that Reivers was about to try something new. He drew back a little, Reivers following closely. Suddenly it came. Without warning Reivers kicked. The blow took Toppy in the groin and he stumbled backward from its force. A cry of rage went up from the watching men. But Toppy sprung erect in an instant.

“All right!” he called. “It didn’t hurt me. Shut up, you fools.”

Thanks to his training, his hard muscles had turned the kick and saved him from being disabled.

“What’s the matter, Reivers?” he taunted as he circled carefully. “Losing confidence in your fists? Got to use your feet, eh? Lost your kick, too, haven’t you? Well, well! Then you certainly are in for a fine trimming!”

Again Reivers kicked, this time aiming low at the shin-bone; but Toppy avoided it easily and danced back with a laugh.

“Can’t even land it any more!” Treplin chuckled. “Show us some more tricks, Reivers!”

Reivers had thrown off all restraint now. He fought with lowered head, and Toppy once more, as he saw the eyes watching him through the thick brows, thought of a bear. The savagery at the root of Reivers’ character was coming to the top. It was mastering, choking down his intelligence. He struck and kicked and gnashed his teeth; and curses rolled in a steady stream from his lips. One kick landed on Toppy’s thigh with a thud.

“Here, bahass!” screamed a voice to Toppy, and from somewhere in the crowd an ax was pitched at his feet.

Laughingly Toppy kicked the weapon to one side, and, though in deep pain from the last kick, continued fighting as if nothing had happened.

The savage now dominating Reivers had seen and been caught by the sight of the flashing steel. A gleam of animal cunning showed in the depths of his ferocious eyes. To cripple, to kill, to destroy with one terrible stroke—that was his single passion. The axe opened the way.

Craftily he began rushing systematically. Little by little he drove Toppy back. Closer and closer he came to the spot where the axe lay on the ground. Once more Toppy’s instinct warned him that Reivers was after a terrible coup, and once more his whole mind and body responded with extra vigilance.

As he circled, presently he felt the axe under his feet and understood. He saw that Reivers was systematically working toward the weapon, though apparently unconscious of its existence.

It was in Toppy’s mind to dance away, to call out to the men to remove the axe; but before he could do so something had whispered to him to hold his tongue. He continued to retreat slowly, fighting back at every inch.

Now he had stepped beyond the axe.

Now it lay between him and Reivers.

Now it lay beneath Reivers’ feet, and now, as Reivers stooped to pick it up, Toppy, like a tiger, flung himself forward. It was what he had foreseen, what had made him hold his tongue.

The savage in Reivers had made him reach for the weapon; the calmly reasoning brain in Toppy’s head had foreseen that in that lay his advantage. It was for only an instant, a few eye-winks, that Reivers paused and bent over for the axe; but as Toppy had flung himself forward at the psychological moment it was enough. Reivers was bent over with his hand on the axe, and for a flash he had left the spot behind his left ear exposed.

Toppy’s fist, swung from far behind him, struck the spot with the sound of a pistol crack. Reivers, stooped as he was, rolled over and over and lay still. Toppy first picked up the axe and threw it far out of reach. Then he turned to Reivers, who was rising slowly, a string of foul curses on his lips.

Toppy set himself as the Snow-Burner came forward. His left lifted Reivers from his feet. Even while he was in the air, Toppy’s right followed on the jaw. The Snow-Burner wavered. Then Toppy, drawing a long breath, called into play all the strength he had been saving. He struck and struck again so rapidly that the eye could not follow, and each blow found its mark; and each was of deadly power.

He drove Reivers backward. He drove him as he willed. He beat him till he saw Reivers’ eyes grow glassy. Then he stepped back. The almost superhuman strength of Reivers had kept him on his feet until now in spite of the pitiless storm of blows. Now he swayed back and forth once. His breath came in gasps. His arms fell inert, his eyes closed slowly; and as a great tree falls—slowly at first, then with a sudden crash—the Snow-Burner toppled and fell face downward on the ground.

CHAPTER XX—TOPPY’S WAY

“We got him! Kill him! Come on! Finish him!” they roared, and threw themselves like a pack of wolves upon the prostrate man. Even as they rushed Reivers raised his head in returning consciousness; then he went down under a shower of heavily booted feet.

With a bellow of command Toppy flung himself forward. He knew quite well that this was what Reivers deserved; he had even at times hoped that the men some time would have the opportunity for such revenge. But now he discovered that he couldn’t stand by and see it done. It wasn’t in him. Reivers was down, fairly beaten in a hard fight. He was helpless. Toppy’s rage suddenly swerved from Reivers to the men who were trying to kick the life out of him.

“Back! Get back there, I say!” he ordered.

He reached in and threw men right and left. He knocked others down. One he picked up and used as a battering-ram, and so he fought his way in and cleared the rabble away from Reivers. Reivers with more than human tenaciousness had retained a glimmer of consciousness. He saw Toppy standing astride of him fighting for his life. And in that beaten, desperate moment Reivers laughed once more.

“You’re a —— fool, Treplin,” said he. “You’d better let them finish the job.”

Toppy dragged him to his feet. A gleam of mastery flashed over the Snow-Burner as he felt himself standing upright. He swung to face the men.

“Out of the way there, you scum!” he ordered, in his old manner. The men laughed in reply. The spell had been broken. The men had seen the Snow-Burner knocked down and beaten. They had seen that Toppy was his master. They had kicked him; they had had him under them. No longer did he stand apart and above them. They cursed him and swarmed in, striking, kicking, hauling, and dragged him to the ground.

“Give him to us, bahss!” they cried. “Let us kill him, bahss!”

Some of them hung back. They did not wish to run contrary to the wishes of Toppy, their “bahss” and champion. Toppy once more got Reivers on his feet and dragged him toward the gate. A knife or two gleamed in the crowd.

“Run for the gate!” cried Toppy. Reivers tottered a few steps and fell. Over him Toppy stormed, fought, commanded, but the mob pressed constantly closer. Then, suddenly, they stopped striking. They began to break. Toppy, looking around for the reason, saw Campbell and a guard running toward them—Campbell with his big revolver, the guard with his gun at a ready. With a last tremendous effort he picked Reivers up in his arms and ran to meet them. He heard the guard fire once, heard Campbell ordering the men to stand back; then he staggered out of the stockade and dropped his heavy burden on the ground. Behind him Campbell and the guard slammed shut the gate, and within the cries and curses of the men rose in one awful wail, the cry of a blood-mob cheated of its prey.

Reivers rose slowly, first to his hands and knees, then to his feet. He looked at Toppy, and the only expression upon his face was a sneer.

“You —— fool!” he laughed. “You poor weak sister! You’ll be sorry before morning that you didn’t let the men finish that job!”

He turned, and without another word went staggering away to the building where he and the guards lived.

CHAPTER XXI—THE END OF THE BOSS

“You don’t think he’ll try——”

“The Snow-Burner will try anything if his mind’s set. Even force.—Hold still wi’ your chin.—You licked him fair, lad. ’Twas a great fight. You’re best man. But I’m glad I have my shooting-utensil handy, for if I’m any judge Hell Camp will aye deserve its name to-night.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“’Tis hard to say. But ’tis sure Reivers means to do something desperate, and as I know the man ’tis something that concerns the lass. Then there are the men. They have tasted blood. They have seen the Snow-Burner beaten. His grip has been torn off them. They’re no longer afraid. When the working gangs come in this noon and hear the story there’ll be nothing can hold them from doing what they please. You know what that will be. They’re wild to break loose. Gi’n they lay hands on Reivers they’ll tear him and the camp to pieces. Aye, there’ll be things stirring here before evening, or I’m a dolt.”

True to Campbell’s prediction, the stockade shook with cheers, roars and curses that noon when the working men came in and heard the tale of the Snow-Burner’s downfall. The discipline of the camp vanished with those shouts. The men were no longer cowed. They were free and unafraid. After they had eaten, the straw-bosses and guards prepared to lead them back to their work.

The men laughed. The bosses joined them. The guards threatened. The men jeered. Reivers, the only force that had kept them cowed, was lying beaten and helpless in his bunk, and not even the shotguns of the guards could cow the fierce spirit that had broken loose in the men when they heard this news.

“Shoot, —— you, shoot!” they jeered at the guards.

The guards faltered. The whole camp was in revolt and they knew that as sure as one shot was fired the men would rush at no matter how great the cost to themselves. There were a hundred and fifty maddened, desperate men in the camp now, instead of a hundred and fifty cattle; and the guards, minus Reivers’ leadership, retreated to their quarters and locked the door.

The men did not go back to work. Not an axe, peavey or cant-hook was touched; not a team was hitched up. The men swaggered and shouted for Reivers to come out and boss them. They begged him to come out. They wanted to talk with him. They had a lot to tell him. They wouldn’t hurt him—no, they would only give him a little of his own medicine!

However, they gave the guards’ house a wide berth, on account of the deadly shotguns. The short afternoon passed quickly and the darkness came on.

Toppy and Campbell were sitting down to supper when they noticed that it was unusually light in the direction of the stockade. Presently there was a roaring crackling; then a chorus of cries, demonlike in their ferocity. Toppy sprang to the window and staggered back at the sight that met his eyes.

“Great Scot, Campbell! Look, look!” he cried. “They’ve fired the camp!”

Together they rushed to the door. From the farther end of the stockade a billow of red, pitchy flame was sweeping up into the night, and the roar and crackle of the dried pine logs burning was drowned in the cries of the men as they cheered the results of their handiwork.

Toppy and Campbell ran toward the stockade gate. The gate had been chopped to pieces, but the guards, from the shelter of their building, were shooting at the opening and preventing the men from rushing out. The flames at the far end of the stockade rose higher and fiercer as they began to get their hold on the pitchy wood. The smoke, billowing low, came driving back into the faces of Campbell and Toppy.

“They’ve done it up brown now!” swore Campbell. “The wind’s this way. The whole camp will go unless yon fire’s checked.”

Over the front of the stockade something flew through the darkness, its parabola marked by a string of sparks that spluttered behind it. It fell near one side of the guards’ quarters. A second later it exploded with a noise and shock that shook the whole camp.

“Dynamite,” said Scotty. “The men have been stealing it and saving it for this occasion. Gi’n one of those sticks lands on that building there’ll be dead men inside.”

But the men inside evidently had no mind to wait for such a catastrophe. They came rushing out in the darkness, slipping quickly out of sight, yet firing at the gate as they went. One of them rushed past Toppy in the direction of the office. Toppy scarcely noticed him. On second thought something about the man’s great size, his broad shoulders, the hang of his arms, attracted him. He turned to look; the man had vanished in the dark. A vague uneasiness took possession of Toppy. For a moment he stood puzzled.

“My ——!” he cried suddenly. “That was Reivers, and he was going to her!”

He started in pursuit. Reivers was pounding on the door of the office when Toppy reached him. The door was locked.

“Open up; open up at once!” he ordered. Beyond the door Toppy heard the voice of the girl.

“Oh, please, please, Mr. Reivers! I’m afraid!”

Reivers’ tone changed.

“Nothing to be afraid of, Miss Pearson,” he said blandly. “There’s a fire in camp. I want to get in to save the books and papers.”

“Is that why you sent Tilly away this morning?” said Toppy quietly, coming up behind him.

Reivers turned with a start.

“Hello, Treplin!” he said, recovering himself instantly. “No hard feelings, I hope.” His manner was so at ease that Toppy was thrown off his guard.

“I won’t make the mistake of fighting with you any more, Treplin,” continued Reivers. “Look at the way you’ve spoiled my nose. You ought to fix that up for me. Look at it.”

He came closer and pointed with two fingers to his broken nose. Toppy, unsuspecting, leaned forward. Before he could move head or arms Reivers’ two hands had shot out and fastened like two iron claws upon his unprotected throat.

“Now, —— you!” hissed Reivers. “Tear me loose or kiss your life good-by.”

And Toppy tried to tear him loose—tried with a desperation born of the sudden knowledge that his life depended upon it; and failed. The Snow-Burner had got his death-hold. His arms were like bars of steel; his fingers yielded no more to Toppy’s tugging than claws of moulded iron. “Struggle, —— you! Fight, —— you!” hissed Reivers. “That’s right; die hard; for, by ——, you’re done now!”

The eyes seemed starting from Toppy’s head. His brains seemed to be bursting. He felt a strange emptiness in his chest. Things went red, then they began to go black. He made one final futile attempt. He felt his legs sinking, felt his whole body sagging, felt that the end had come; then heard as if far away the office-door fly open, heard the girl crying——

“Stop, Mr. Reivers, or I’ll shoot!”

Then the roar of a shot. He felt the hands loosen on his throat, swayed and fell sidewise as the whole world turned black.

He opened his eyes soon and saw by the light of the rising flames that Campbell was running toward him. In the doorway of the office stood the girl, her left hand over her eyes, Campbell’s big black revolver in her right. Down the road, with strange, drunken steps, Reivers was running toward the river. Behind him ran half a dozen men armed with axes screaming his name in rage, but Reivers, despite his queer gait, was distancing his pursuers. It was some time before Toppy grasped the significance of these sights. Then he remembered.

“You—you saved me,” he said clumsily, rising to his feet. The girl dropped the revolver and burst into a fit of sobbing.

“’Twas aye handy I thought of giving her the gun and telling her to keep the door locked,” said Campbell. “Do you go in, lassie. All’s well. Go in.”

“Eh? What’s this?” he cried, for in spite of her sobbing she drew sharply away from his sheltering arm as he tried to usher her indoors.

The smoke from the fire swept down into their faces in a choking cloud. Toppy looked toward the stockade. By this time the whole end of the great building was in flames. The men in pursuit of Reivers were howling as they gained on their quarry, and Toppy lurched after them.

“Bob! Mr. Treplin!”

Toppy stopped.

“I mean—Mr. Treplin—you—don’t go down there—you’re hurt—please!”

Toppy moved toward her. Was it true? Was it really there the note in her voice that he yearned to hear?

“What did you say—please?” he stammered.

And now it was her turn to be confused. The sobs came back to her. Toppy took a long breath and nerved himself to desperation.

“Helen!” he said hoarsely.

“Bob! Oh, Bob!” she whispered. “Don’t leave me—don’t leave me alone.”

Once more Toppy filled his lungs with air and ground his teeth in desperate resolution. He tried to speak, but only a gurgling sound came from his throat; so he held out his big arms in mute appeal, and suddenly he found himself whispering incoherently at a little blonde head which lay snuggled in great content against his bosom.

A maddened yell came from the men who were after Reivers. But Toppy and the girl might have been a thousand miles away for all the attention they paid. One end of the stockade fell in with a great roar and a shower of flame and sparks; but the twain did not hear.

“Aye, aye!” Old Campbell moved swiftly away. “He’s a grown man now, and so he’s a right to have his woman.—Aye. A real man he had to be to take her away from the Snow-Burner.”

Down by the river the pursuing men gave tongue to a cry with the note of the wolf in it.

Campbell turned from the young couple and stared with gleaming eyes in the direction whence came the cry.

“Ah, Reivers!” he murmured. “Ye great man gone wrong! How goes it with ye now, Reivers? Can ye win through? Can ye? I wonder—I wonder!”

And as Toppy and Helen, holding closely to one another, entered the office building, the old man hastened to join the throng by the river where the fate of the Snow-Burner was being spun.

PART TWO: THE SUPER MAN

CHAPTER XXII—THE CHEATING OF THE RIVER

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.”

CHAPTER XXIII—THE GIRL WHO WAS NOT AFRAID

A wind came with it, a bleak, morning Winter wind which whined as it whipped the dry snow from high places and sent it flying across coulée and valley in the grey light of dawn. Nothing stirred with the coming of daylight. No nocturnal animal, warned of the day’s coming, slunk away to its cave; no beast or bird of daylight greeted the morning with movement or song. The grey half-light revealed no living thing of life upon the exposed hump of the ridge.

The sun came, a ball of dull red, rising over the timber line. It touched the topmost spires of rock, sought to gild them rosily, gave up as their sullen sides refused to take the colour, and turned its rays along the eastern slope. Then something moved. A single speck of life stirred in the vast scene of desolation.

On the bare ground in the lea of a boulder a man sat with his back to the stone and slept. His face was hollow and lined. The corners of his mouth were drawn down as if a weight were hung on each of them, and the thin cheeks, hugging the bones so tightly that the teeth showed through, told that the man had driven himself too far on an empty stomach. Yet, even in sleep, there was a hint of a sardonic smile on the misshapen lips, a smile that condemned and made naught the pain and cruelty of his fate.

The sun crept down the slope of Hog-Back Ridge and found him. It reached his eyes. Its rays had no more warmth than the rays of the cold Winter moon, but its light pierced through the tightly drawn lids. They twitched and finally parted. Reivers awoke without yawning or moving and looked around.

It was the second morning after his flight from Cameron-Dam Camp, and he had yet to reach the Winter camp of the people of Tillie the squaw. Somewhere to the west it lay. He would reach it and reach it in good time, he swore; but he had not had a bite of food in his mouth for two days, and the fever of his wound had sapped heavily his strength.

“Be still, Body,” he growled, as with the return of consciousness his belly cried out for food. “You will be fed before life goes out of you.”

He rose slowly and stiffly to his knees and looked down the ridge to where the rays of the sun now were illumining the snow-covered bottom of the valley below. The valley ran eastward for a mile or two, and at first glance it was empty and dead, save for the flurries of wind-swept snow, dropping down from the heights above. But Reivers, as he rose to his feet, swept the valley with a second glance, and suddenly he dropped and crouched down close to the ground.

Far down at the lower end of the valley a black speck showed on the frozen snow, and the speck was moving.

Reivers lay on the bare patch of ground, as silent and immovable as the rock above him. The speck was too large to be a single animal and too small to be a pack of travelling caribou.

For several minutes he lay, scarcely breathing, his eyes straining to bring the speck into comprehensible shape. His breath began to come rapidly. Presently he swore. The speck had become two specks now, a long narrow speck and a tiny one which moved beside it, and they were coming steadily up the valley toward where he lay.

“One man and a dog-team,” mused Reivers. “He won’t be travelling here without grub. Body, wake up! You are crying for food. Yonder it comes. Get ready to take it.”

Slowly, with long pauses between each movement, and taking care not to place his dark body against the white snow, Reivers dragged himself around to a hiding-place behind the boulder against which he had slept. The sun had risen higher now. Its rays were lighting the valley, and as he peered avidly around one side of the stone, Reivers could make out some detail of the two specks that moved so steadily toward him.

It was a four-dog team, travelling rapidly, and the man, on snow-shoes, travelled beside his team and plied his whip as he strode. Reivers’ brows drew down in puzzled fashion. The sledge which whirled behind the running dogs seemed flat and unloaded; the dogs ran in a fashion that told they were strong and fresh. Why didn’t the man ride?

Reivers drew back to take stock of the situation. The man might be a stranger, travelling hurriedly through the Dead Lands, or he might be one of the men from Cameron-Dam Camp. If the former, food might be had for a mere hail and the asking; if the latter—Reivers’s nostrils widened and he smiled.

Yet a third possibility existed. The man was travelling in strange fashion, running beside an apparently empty sled, and whipping his dogs along. So did men travel when they were fleeing from various reasons, and men fleeing thus do not go unarmed nor take kindly to having the trail of their flight witnessed by casual though starving strangers. Thus there was one chance that a hail and plea for food would be met with a friendly response; two chances that they would be met with lead or steel.

Reivers, not being a careless man, looked about for ways and means to place the odds in his favour. A hundred yards to the north of him the valley narrowed into a mere slit between two straight walls of rock. Through this gap the traveller must pass.

When Reivers had crawled to a position on the rock directly above the narrow opening, he lay flat down and grinned in peace. He was securely hidden, and the dog-driver would pass unsuspectingly, unready, thirty feet beneath where he lay. Things were looking well.

The driver and team came on at a steady pace. Even at a great distance, his stride betrayed his race and Reivers muttered, “White man,” and pushed to the edge of the bluff a huge, jagged piece of rock. The man might not listen to reason, and Reivers was taking no chances of allowing an opportunity to feed to slip by.

The sleigh still puzzled him. As it came nearer and nearer he saw that it was not empty. Something long and flat lay upon it. Reivers ceased to watch the driver and turned his scrutiny entirely to the bundle upon the sleigh. Minute after minute he watched the sleigh to the exclusion of everything else.

He made out eventually that the bundle was the size and form of a human body. Soon he saw that it moved now and then, as if struggling to rise.

The sleigh came nearer, came into a space where the sunlight, streaming through a gap in the ridge, lighted it up brightly, and Reivers’ whole body suddenly stiffened upon the ground and his teeth snapped shut barely in time to cut short an ejaculation of surprise.

The bundle on the sleigh was a woman—a white woman! And she was bound around from ankle to forehead with thongs passed under the sleigh.

“Food—and a woman—a white woman,” he mused. “The new life becomes interesting. Body, get ready.”

He held the rock balanced on the edge of the cliff, ready to hurl it down with one supreme effort of his waning strength. Hugging the cliff he lay, his head barely raised sufficiently to watch his approaching quarry. He could make out the face of the man by this time, a square face, mostly covered with hair, with the square-cut hair of the head hanging down below the ears. Two fang-like teeth glistened in the sunlight when the man opened his mouth to curse at the dogs, and he turned at times to leer back at the helpless burden on the sleigh.

As he approached the narrow defile, where the rock walls hid a man and what he might do from the eyes of all but the sky above, the man turned to look more frequently, more leeringly at his victim. Reivers saw that the woman was gagged as well as bound.

The driver shouted a command at his dogs, and their lope became a walk, and even as Reivers, up on the cliff, arched his back to hurl his stone, the outfit came to a halt directly beneath where he lay. Reivers waited. He had no compunction about disabling or killing the man below; a crying belly knows no conscience. But he would wait and see what was to develop.

The man swiftly jerked his team back in the traces and turned toward his victim. Reivers, turning his eyes from the man to the woman, received a shock which caused him to hug closer to the cliff. The woman lay helpless on the sleigh, face up. A cloth gag covered her face up to the nose, and a cap, drawn down over the forehead, left only the eyes and nose visible. And the eyes were wide open—very wide open—and they were looking quite calmly and unafraid up at Reivers.

The driver came back and tore the gag from the woman’s lips.

“I’ll give you a chance,” he exploded, and Reivers, up on the cliff, caught the passion-choked note in voice and again held the stone ready. “I’m stealing you for the chief—for Shanty Moir, the man who’s got your father’s mine, and who’s determined to put shame on you, Red MacGregor’s daughter. I’m taking you there to him—in his camp. You know what that means.

“Well, I’ve changed my mind. I—I’ll give you a chance. I’ll save you. Come with me. I won’t take you up there. We’ll go out of the country. You know what it’d mean to go up there. Well,—I’ll marry you.”

Many things happened in the next few seconds. The man threw himself like a wild beast beside the sledge, caught the woman’s face in his hands and kissed her bestially upon the helpless lips.

The girl did not struggle or cry out. Only her wide eyes looked up to the top of the cliff, looked questioningly, speculatively, calmly. He of the hairy face caught the direction of her look and sprang up and whirled around, the glove flying from his right hand, and a six-shooter leaping into it apparently from nowhere.

His face was upturned, and he fired even as the big rock smote him on the forehead and crushed him shapelessly into the snow. Reivers dragged forward another stone and waited, but the man was too obviously dead to render caution necessary.

“He was experienced and quick,” said Reivers to the woman, “but I was too hungry to miss him. Did you think I did it to save you? Oh, no! Just a minute, till I get down; you’ll know me better.”

He staggered and fell as he rose to pick his way down, for the cast with the heavy stone had tapped the last reservoirs of his depleted strength, had wrenched open the wounded shoulder and started the blood. Painfully he dragged himself on hands and knees to a snow-covered slope, and slipping and sliding made his way to the valley-bottom and came staggering up to the sledge. The woman to him for the time being did not exist.

“Steady, Body,” he muttered, as he tore open the grub-bag on the sleigh. “Here’s food.”

His fingers fell first on a huge chunk of cooked venison, and he looked no farther. Down in the snow at the side of the helpless woman he squatted and proceeded to eat. Only when the pang in his stomach had been appeased did he look at the woman. Then, for a time, he forgot about eating.

It was not a woman but a girl. Her face was fair and her hair golden red. Her big eyes were looking at him appraisingly. There was no fear in them, no apprehension. She noted the hollowness of his cheeks, the fever in his eyes. Reivers almost dropped his meat in amazement. The girl actually was pitying him!

He stood up, thrust the meat back into the grub-bag and stood swaying and towering over her. The girl’s eyes looked back unwaveringly.

“—— you!” growled Reivers as he bent down and loosed the thongs. “What do you mean? Why aren’t you afraid?”

“MacGregor Roy was my father,” she said quietly. “I am not afraid.” She sat up as the bonds fell from her and looked at the still figure in the snow. “He is dead, I suppose?”

“As dead as he tried to make me,” sneered Reivers.

A look of annoyance crossed her face.

“Then you have spoiled it all,” she broke out, leaping from the sledge. “Spoiled the fine chance I had to find the cave of Shanty Moir, murderer of my father.”

Reivers’ jaw dropped in amazement, and hot anger surged to his tongue. Many women of many kinds he had looked in the eyes and this was the first one—

“Spoiled it, you red-haired trull! What do you mean? Didn’t I save you from our bearded friend yonder. Or—” his thin lips curled into their old contemptuous smile—“or perhaps—perhaps you are one of those to whom such attentions are not distasteful.”

The sudden flare and flash of her anger breaking, like lightning out of a Winter’s sky, checked his words. The contempt of his smile gave place to a grin of admiration. Tottering and wavering on his feet, he did not stir or raise his arms, though the thin-bladed knife which seemed to spring into her hands as claws protrude from a maddened cat’s paws, slipped through his mackinaw and pricked the skin above his heart, before her hand stopped.

“‘Trull’ am I? The daughter of MacGregor Roy is a helpless squaw who takes kindly to such words from any man on the trail? Blood o’ my father! Pray, you cowardly skulker! Pray!”

His grin grew broader.

“Pretty, very pretty!” he drawled. “But you can’t make it good, can you? You thought you could. Your little flare of temper made you feel big. You were sure you were going to stick me. But you couldn’t do it. You’re a woman. See; your flash of bigness is dying out. You’re growing tame. That’s one of my specialties—taming spitfires like you. Oh, you needn’t draw back. Have no fear. I never did have any taste for red hair.”

A painter would have raved about the daughter of MacGregor Roy as she now stood back, facing her tormentor. The fair skin of her face was flushed red, the thin sharp lines of mouth and nostril were tremulous with rage, and her wide, grey eyes burned. Her head was thrown back in scorn, her cap was off; the glorious red-golden hair of her head seemed alive with fury. With one foot advanced, the knife held behind her, her breath coming in angry gasps, she stood, a figure passionately, terribly alive in the dead waste of the snows.

“Oh, what a coward you are!” she panted. “You knew I couldn’t avenge myself on a sick man. You coward!”

Reivers laughed drunkenly. The fever was blurring his sight, dulling his brain and filling him with an irresistible desire to lie down.

“Yes, I knew it,” he mumbled. “I saw it in your eye. You couldn’t do it—because I didn’t want you to. I want you—I want you to fix me up—hole in the shoulder—fever—understand?”

“I understand that when Duncan Roy, my father’s brother, catches up with us he will save me the trouble by putting a hole through your head.”

“Plenty of time for that later on.” Reivers fought off the stupor and held his senses clear for a moment. “Have you got my whisky?”

“And what if I have?”

“Answer me!” he said icily. “Have you?”

“Duncan Roy has whisky,” she replied reluctantly. “He will be on our trail now.”

“How long—how long before he’ll get here?”

“Yon beast—” she nodded her head toward the still figure in the snow—“raided our camp, struck me down and stole me away with my team two hours before sundown, yestere’en. Duncan Roy was out meat-hunting, and would be back by dark. He’ll be two hours behind us, and his dogs travel even with these.”

“Two hours? Too long,” groaned Reivers and pitched headlong into the snow.

CHAPTER XXIV—THE WOMAN’S WAY

“And what have we—you and I—to do with sick, helpless beings? Are we not on the trail to find Shanty Moir, who is working your father’s mine, wherever it is, and there take vengeance on said Shanty for your father’s murder, as well as recover your own property? Is this a trail on which ’tis fit and well we halted to nurse and care for sick, helpless beings? Blood of the de’il! An unlucky mess! What business has man to be sick and ailing on the Winter trail here in the North? ’Tis the law of Nature that such die!”

“And do you think that law will be followed here?” demanded the girl.

“Were I alone, it would,” retorted the man. “Our task is to find the place of Shanty Moir and do him justice.”

“And the hospitality of the MacGregors? Is it like Duncan Roy to see beast or man needing or wanting help without stretching his hand to help it?”

The man was silent.

“Do you think any good could come to you or me if we turned our hearts to stones and let a sick man perish after he had fallen helpless on our hands?”

“I tell you what I think, Hattie MacGregor,” broke out the big voice. “I think there is trouble travelling as trail-fellow with this man. I see trouble in the cut of his jaw and the lines of his mouth. There is a fate written there; he’s a fated man and no else, and nothing would please me better than to have him a thousand days mushing away from me and never to see him again. Trouble and trouble! It’s written on him plain.

“Who is he? Whence came he? Why is he alone, dogless, foodless, weaponless, here in these Dead Lands! ’Tis uncanny. Blood o’ the de’il! He might be dropped down from somewhere, or more like shot up from somewhere—from the black pit, for instance. It’s no’ proper for mere human being to be found in his condition out this far on the barrens, with no sign of how he came or why?”

“Have no fear, Uncle Duncan,” laughed the girl. “He’s only a common man.”

Reivers opened his eyes, chuckling feverishly.

“You’ll pay for that ‘common,’ you spitfire, when I’ve tamed you,” he mumbled.

“Only a common man, Uncle Duncan,” repeated the girl steadfastly, “and I’ve a bone to pick with him when he’s on his feet, no longer helpless and pitiable as he is now.”

Again Reivers laughed through the haze of fever. He did not have the strength to hold his eyes open, but his mind worked on.

“Helpless! Did you notice the incident of the rock?” he babbled. “Bare, primitive, two-handed man against a man with a gun. Who won?”

“Aye,” said the man seriously, “we owe you thanks for that. For a helpless man, you deal stout knocks.”

“And speak big words,” snapped the girl. “Now, around with the teams, Uncle Duncan, and back to camp. There’s been talk enough. We must take him in and shelter and care for him, since he has fallen helpless and pitiable on our hands. We owe him no thanks. Can you not lay his head easier—the boasting fool! There; that’s better. Now, all that the dogs can stand, Uncle, for I misdoubt we’ll be hard-pressed to keep the life in him till we get him back to camp.”

Reivers heard and strove to reply. But the paralysis of fever and weakness was upon him, and all that came from his lips was an incoherent babbling. In the last vapoury stages of consciousness he realised that he was being placed more comfortably upon the sledge, that his head was being lifted and that blankets were being strapped about him.

He felt the sledge being turned, heard the runners grate on the snow; then ensued an easy, sliding movement through space, as the rested dogs started their lope back through the valley. The movement soothed him. It lulled him to a sensation of safety and comfort.

The phantasmagoria of fever pounded at his brain, his eyes and ears, but the steady, swishing rush of the sleigh drove them away. He slept, and awoke when a halt was called and more whisky forced down his throat. Then he slept again.

There were several halts. Once he realised that he was being fed thin soup, made from cooked venison and snow-water. That was the last impression made on remaining consciousness. After that the thread snapped.

The sledges went on. They left the valley. Through the jumbled ridges of the Dead Lands they hurried. They reached a stretch of stunted fir, and still they continued to go. At length they pulled up before a solid little cabin built in a cleft of rocks.

The Snow Burner was carried in and put to bed. After a rest Duncan Roy and the fresher of the dogteams took the trail again. They came, back after a day and a night, bringing with them a certain Père Batiste, skilled in treating fevers and wounds of the body as well as of the soul. The good curé gasped at the torso which revealed itself to his gaze as he stripped off the clothes to work at the wound.

“If le bon Dieu made him as well inside as outside, this is a very good man,” he said simply; and Duncan MacGregor smiled grimly.

“God—or the de’il—made him to deal stout knocks, that’s sure,” he grunted. “’Tis a rare animal we have stripped before us.”

“A rare human being—a soul,” reproved Father Batiste. “And it is le bon Dieu who makes us all.”

“But the de’il gets hold of some very young,” insisted the Scotchman.

Father Batiste stayed in the cabin for two days.

“He was not meant to die this time,” he said later. “It will be long—weeks perhaps—before he will be strong enough to take the trail. He will need care, such care as only a woman can give him. If he does not have this care he will die. If he does have it he will live. Adieu, my children; you have a sacred, human life in your hands.”

And he got the care that only a woman could give him. For the next two weeks Duncan MacGregor watched his niece’s devoted nursing and gnawed his red beard gloomily.

“Trouble—trouble—trouble!” he muttered over and over to himself. “It rides around the man’s head like a storm-cap. Hattie MacGregor, take care. Yon man will be a different creature to handle when he has the strength back in his body.”

At the end of a week Reivers awoke as a man wakes after a long, fever-breaking slumber, weak and wasted, yet with a grateful sense of comfort and well-being. Before he opened his eyes he sensed by the warmth and odours of the air that he was in a small, tight room, and in a haze he fancied that he had fallen in the tepee of Tillie, the squaw. Then he remembered. He opened his eyes.

He was lying in a bunk, raised high from the floor, and above the foot of the bed was a small window, shaded by a frilled white curtain. Reivers lay long and looked at the curtain before his eyes moved to further explore the room. For once, long, long ago, he had belonged in a world where white frilled curtains and frills of other kinds were not an exception.

In his physically washed-out condition his memory reached back and pictured that world with uncanny clearness, and he turned from the curtain with a frown of annoyance to look straight into the eyes of Duncan Roy, who sat by the fireplace across the room and studied him from beneath shaggy red brows.

Reivers looked the man over idly at first, then with a considerable interest and appreciation. Sitting crouched over on a low stone bench, with the light of the fire and of the sun upon him, MacGregor resembled nothing so much as an old red-haired bear. He was short of leg and bow-legged, but his torso and head were enormous. His arms, folded across the knees, were bear-like in length and size, and his hair and beard flamed golden red.

There was no friendliness in the small, grey eyes which regarded Reivers so steadily. Duncan MacGregor was no man to hide his true feelings. Reivers looked enquiringly around.

“She’s stepped outside to feed the dogs,” said MacGregor, interpreting the look. “You’ll have to put up with my poor company for the time being.”

“I accept your apology,” said Reivers and turned comfortably toward the wall.

A deep, chesty chuckle came from the fireside.

“Man, whoever are you or whatever are you, to take it that Duncan MacGregor feels any need to apologise to you?”

The words were further balm to Reivers’s new-found feeling of comfort and content.

“Say that again, please,” he requested drowsily.

Laughingly the giant by the fire repeated his query.

“Good!” murmured Reivers. “I just wanted to be sure that you didn’t know who I am—or, rather, who I was?”

“Blood o’ the de’il!” laughed the Scotchman. “So it’s that, is it? Tell me, how much reward is there offered for you, dead or alive? I’m a thrifty man, lad, and you hardly look like a man who’d have a small price on his head.”

“Wrong, quite wrong, my suspicious friend,” said Reivers. “I see you’ve the simple mind of the man who’s spent much time in lone places. You jump at the natural conclusion. When you know me better you’ll know that that won’t apply to me.”

“Well,” drawled the Scotchman good-naturedly, “I do not say that it looks suspicious to be found a two-days’ march out in the Dead Lands, without food, dog, or weapons, with an empty belly and a hole through the shoulder, but there are people who might draw the conclusion that a man so fixed was travelling because some place behind him was mighty bad for his health. But I have no doubt you have an explanation? No doubt ’tis quite the way you prefer to travel?”

“Under certain circumstances, it is,” said Reivers.

“Aye; under certain circumstances. Such as an affair with a ‘Redcoat,’ for instance.”

“Wrong again, my simple-minded friend. You’re quite welcome to bring the whole Mounted Police here to look me over. I’m not on their lists, or the lists of any authority in the world, as ‘wanted.’”

“For that insult—that I’m of the kind that bears tales to the police—I’ll have an accounting with you later on,” said MacGregor sharply. “For the rest—you’ll admit that you’re under some small obligation to us—will you be kind enough to explain what lay behind you that you should be out on the barrens in your condition? I’ll have you know that I am no man to ask pay for succouring the sick or wounded. Neither am I the man to let any well man be near-speaking with my ward and niece, Hattie MacGregor, without I know what’s the straight of him.”

Reivers turned luxuriously in his bunk and regarded his inquisitor with a smile.

“Poor, dainty, helpless, little lady!” he mocked. “So weak and frail that she needs a protector. Never carries anything more than an eight-inch knife up her sleeve. You do right, MacGregor; your niece certainly needs looking after. She certainly doesn’t know how to take care of herself.

“But about obligations, I don’t quite agree with you. Didn’t you owe me a little something for that turn with the bearded fellow? Not that I did it to save the girl,” he continued loudly, as he heard the door open behind him and knew that Hattie MacGregor had entered. “What was she to me? Nothing! But I was hungry. I needed food. But for that our black-bearded friend might now have been wandering care-free over the snows, a red-haired woman still strapped to his sledge, his taste seeming to run to that colour, which mine does not.”