over roots, Jake Kloon took his last trail
through the wilderness, leaving a redder path than was left by the
setting sun through fern and moss and wastes of pitcher-plants.

Always, as Leverett crept on, pulling the dead behind him, the floor of
the woods trembled slightly, and a black ooze wet the crust of withered
leaves.

At the quaking edge of a little pool of water, Leverett halted. The
water was dark but scarcely an inch deep over its black bed of silt.

Beside this sink hole the trap-thief dropped Kloon. Then he drew his
hunting knife and cut a tall, slim swamp maple. The sapling was about
twenty feet in height. Leverett thrust the butt of it into the pool.
Without any effort he pushed the entire sapling out of sight in the
depthless silt. He had to manoeuvre very gingerly to dump Kloon into
the pool and keep out of it himself. Finally he managed it.

To his alarm, Kloon did not sink far. He cut another sapling and pushed
the body until only the shoes were visible above the silt.

These, however, were very slowly sinking, now. Bubbles rose, dully
iridescent, floated, broke. Strings of blood hung suspended in the
clouding water.

Leverett went back to the little ridge and covered with dead leaves the
spot where Kloon had lain. There were broken ferns, but he could not
straighten them. And there lay Kloon's rifle.

For a while he hesitated, his habits of economy being ingrained; but he
remembered the packet in his shirt, and he carried the rifle to the
little pool and shoved it, muzzle first, driving it downward, out of
sight.

As he rose from the pool's edge, somebody laid a hand on his shoulder.

That was the most real death that Leverett had ever died.

* * * * *

II

A coward died many times before Old Man Death really gets him.

The swimming minutes passed; his mind ceased to live for a space. Then,
as through the swirling waters of the last dark whirlpool, a dulled roar
of returning consciousness filled his being.

Somebody was shaking him, shouting at him. Suddenly instinct resumed
its function, and he struggled madly to get away from the edge of the
sink-hole -- fought his way, blindly, through the tangled undergrowth
toward the hard ridge. No human power could have blocked the frantic
creature thrashing toward solid ground.

But there Quintana held him in his wiry grip.

"Fool! Mule! Crazee fellow! What did you do, eh? For why you make
jumps like rabbits! Eh? You ex