ng two fingers caressingly back and forth upon
the triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a grip upon a
fox-grape tendril.

A little wait and then the finish came. Fishhead emerged from the cabin
door and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon the
water on his log. He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirt
open down the front to show his yellow neck and breast, his dungaree
trousers held about his waist by a twisted tow string. His broad splay
feet, with the prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve of
the log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came to
its outer end and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinless
face lifted up and something of mastership and dominion in his poise.
And then--his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed--the
round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleams of Joel's eyes,
aimed at him through the green tracery.

In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by
seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head
still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out
across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry. And in his cry
was the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay
of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too,
was a farewell and a defiance and an appeal. The heavy roar of the duck
gun came.

At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of him. He came
down, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twisting
distortedly, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a speared
frog, his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ran
out of him all in one swift coursing flow. His head canted up between
the heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of his
murderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth and Fishhead, in
death still as much fish as man, slid flopping, head first, off the end
of the log and sank, face downward, slowly, his limbs all extended out.
One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middle
of a widening reddish stain on the coffee-colored water.

The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they had
done, and the cranky dugout, tipped far over by the recoil of the gun,
took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden
stroke from below upon its careening botto