ine and stripping it
of the hooked catch--an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and
the shanty boaters of the South. Seeing that he bore this accusation in
silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to
slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of
their lives--bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hard
blows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled and
prone, in the dirt. Moreover, in the onlookers a sense of the
everlasting fitness of things had triumphed over race prejudice and
allowed them--two freeborn, sovereign whites--to be licked by a nigger.

Therefore, they were going to get the nigger. The whole thing had been
planned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown.
There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow after
it. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inborn
fear of the place of Fishhead's habitation.

For more than an hour now they had been coming from their shack across a
deeply indented arm of the lake. Their dugout, fashioned by fire and adz
and draw-knife from the bole of a gum tree, moved through the water as
noiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trail
on the stilled waters. Jake, the better oarsman sat flat in the stern of
the round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes. Joel,
the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duck
gun between his knees.

Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain sure he would
not be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them to
hug closely the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows,
moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mud turtles
barely turned their snaky heads as they passed. So, a full hour before
the time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made for
a natural ambuscade which the mixed breed had left within a stone's jerk
of his cabin to his own undoing.

Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree was
stretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green with
leaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half-uncovered
roots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines and
wild fox-grapes. All about was a huddle of drift--last year's
cornstalks, shreddy strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all the
riffle and