And Jan laughed softly to himself, and his teeth gleamed again, for at last fate was playing his game.  The fire had burned O’Grady’s canoe, and it was to rob him of his own canoe that O’Grady was coming to fight.  A canoe!  He laughed again, while the fire roared over his head and the whirlpool thundered at his feet.  O’Grady would fight for a canoe—­for gold—­while he—­he—­would fight for something else, for the vengeance of a man whose soul and honor had been sold.  He cared nothing for the canoe.  He cared nothing for the gold.  He told himself, in this one tense moment of waiting, that he cared no longer for Marie.  It was the fulfillment of the code.

He was still smiling when O’Grady was so near that he could see the red glare in his eyes.  There was no word, no shout, no sound of fury or defiance as the two men stood for an instant just out of striking distance.  Jan heard the coming together of Jackpine and the Chippewayan.  He heard them straggling, but not the flicker of an eyelash did his gaze leave O’Grady’s face.  Both men understood.  This time had to come.  Both had expected it, even from that day of the fight in the woods when fortune had favored Jan.  The burned canoe had only hastened the hour a little.  Suddenly Jan’s free hand reached behind him to his belt.  He drew forth the second knife and tossed it at O’Grady’s feet.

O’Grady made a movement to pick it up, and then, while Jan was partly off his guard, came at him with a powerful swing of the club.  It was his catlike quickness, the quickness almost of the great northern loon that evades a rifle ball, that had won for Jan in the forest fight.  It saved him now.  The club cut through the air over his head, and, carried by the momentum of his own blow, O’Grady lurched against him with the full force of his two hundred pounds of muscle and bone.  Jan’s knife swept in an upward flash and plunged to the hilt through the flesh of his enemy’s forearm.  With a cry of pain O’Grady dropped his club, and the two crashed to the stone floor of the trail.  This was the attack that Jan had feared and tried to foil, and with a lightning-like squirming movement he swung himself half free, and on his back, with O’Grady’s huge hands linking at his throat, he drew back his knife arm for the fatal plunge.

In this instant, so quick that he could scarcely have taken a breath in the time, his eyes took in the other struggle between Jackpine and the Chippewayan.  The two Indians had locked themselves in a deadly embrace.  All thought of masters, of life or death, were forgotten in the roused-up hatred that fired them now in their desire to kill.  They had drawn close to the edge of the chasm.  Under them the thundering roar of the whirlpool was unheard, their ears caught no sound of the moaning surge of the flames far over their heads.  Even as Jan stared horror-stricken in that one moment, they locked at the edge of the chasm.  Above the tumult of the flood below and the fire above there rose a wild yell, and the two plunged down into the abyss, locked and fighting even as they fell in a twisting, formless shape to the death below.