Stooping down over the tracks made by the maniac as he crawled into the scrub, Nares uttered an ejaculation of horror. 'Poor wretch,' he said, 'look at that,' and he pointed to a huge track, which looked half human, half animal, in its monstrous shapelessness. 'It's his hand, frost-bitten and as big as your head,' said Bromley; 'he can't go much further, I'm thinking.' But he did, and it was full day when the pursuers came out upon a bit of prairie and saw in front of them the broad flooded waters of the Thompson River, and a short distance ahead of them a miserable hunted man still staggering on with his load. As he saw him the child's father uttered a cry and dashed to the front. The madman heard it, looked back, and fled wildly towards the river. Madness uses up the life and strength rapidly, no doubt, but the wasting flame burns fiercely while it lasts, and this last effort of the frost-bitten dying man seemed likely to make pursuit hopeless. 'He is going for the river, heaven help the child!' gasped Nares. About four hundred yards before reaching the river, a broad but slow-running watercourse ran parallel to the Thompson. This was frozen over owing to its shallowness and the sluggishness of its waters. Even the Thompson had a thin fringe of ice on its edges. Without pausing, the madman dashed on to the ice of the stream, which swayed and broke beneath his weight. Crash, crash, he went through, first here, then there, but somehow, though the whole surface of the ice rocked, he struggled on hands and knees from one hole to the other, and reached the farther side in safety. But his troubles in crossing had given his pursuers time to close upon him, and as he gained the shore Snap saw the child's father draw a revolver with a curse and fire at his child's would-be murderer, for that the madman meant to plunge into the Thompson with his victim, and so elude his pursuers, seemed now beyond a doubt. For some reason, for which he could not account, Snap's sympathies were with the wretched madman, and without pausing to think he knocked up the Irishman's revolver before he could fire a second shot, and dashed on to the weak and broken ice. 'I never gave it time to let me in,' Snap explained afterwards, and, indeed, with his blood up as it had never been before, and strong with years of Fernhall training, the boy seemed to skim across the ice like a bird.