well-aimed blow of the butcher.

Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph,
looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but all
around in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many.

No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted next
over the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to work
changing garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of the
boat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coat
and hat, to the horizontal log on which he had lived for so long. He
took the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought to
be a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to the
upright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additional
touch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the ample
bag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it on
Toyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away with
reckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering with
that unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform a
dangerous feat.

The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nook
in the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In the
open river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlit
water and the still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streak
up the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around Fentown
Falls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at his
oars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At every
stroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars made
soft echoes far and wide.