lines, its under side black and rotted and
lapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues. Its
farther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Fishhead, for no
matter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime,
sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank and he
on the outer end of this log. From a distance men had seen him there
many times, sometimes squatted, motionless as the big turtles that would
crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and vigilant
like a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against the
yellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks--all of them yellow
together.

If the Reelfooters shunned Fishhead by day they feared him by night and
avoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting.
For there were ugly stories about Fishhead--stories which all the
negroes and some of the whites believed. They said that a cry which had
been heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across the
darkened waters, was his calling cry to the big cats, and at his bidding
they came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the lake on
moonlight nights, sporting with them, diving with them, even feeding
with them on what manner of unclean things they fed. The cry had been
heard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also that
the big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Fishhead's slough.
No native Reelfooter, white or black, would willingly wet a leg or an
arm there.

Here Fishhead had lived and here he was going to die. The Baxters were
going to kill him, and this day in mid-summer was to be the time of the
killing. The two Baxters--Jake and Joel--were coming in their dugout to
do it. This murder had been a long time in the making. The Baxters had
to brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached the
pitch of action. They were poor whites, poor in everything--repute and
worldly goods and standing--a pair of fever-ridden squatters who lived
on whisky and tobacco when they could get it, and on fish and cornbread
when they couldn't.

The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Fishhead one day in the
spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log,
and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a
bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him,
wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-l