m and it went over and they
were in the lake. But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the
uprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his hot gun, made
for the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over it
and clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free. Something
gripped him--some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by the
thigh, crushing down on his flesh.

He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out and his mouth set in a square
shape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree like
grapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly but
steadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four little
white strips in the tree bark. His mouth went under, next his popping
eyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, and
that was the end of him.

Jake's fate was harder still, for he lived longer--long enough to see
Joel's finish. He saw it through the water that ran down his face, and
with a great surge of his whole body he literally flung himself across
the log and jerked his legs up high into the air to save them. He flung
himself too far, though, for his face and chest hit the water on the far
side. And out of this water rose the head of a great fish, with the
lake slime of years on its flat, black head, its whiskers bristling, its
corpsy eyes alight. Its horny jaws closed and clamped in the front of
Jake's flannel shirt. His hand struck out wildly and was speared on a
poisoned fin, and unlike Joel, he went from sight with a great yell and
a whirling and a churning of the water that made the cornstalks circle
on the edges of a small whirlpool.

But the whirlpool soon thinned away into widening rings of ripples and
the cornstalks quit circling and became still again, and only the
multiplying night noises sounded about the mouth of the slough.

* * * * *

The bodies of all three came ashore on the same day near the same place.
Except for the gaping gunshot wound where the neck met the chest,
Fishhead's body was unmarked. But the bodies of the two Baxters were so
marred and mauled that the Reelfooters buried them together on the bank
without ever knowing which might be Jake's and which might be Joel's.

IX

GUILTY AS CHARGED

The Jew, I take it, is essentially temperamental, whereas the Irishman
is by nature sentimental; so that in the long run both of them m