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.