anoe. With a single stroke of his knife he severed the rope at the
thwart behind him; with another stroke the rope in front. When the tug
came on his body he was jerked clean out of the canoe. It passed out of
his reckoning. By the drag behind him, he knew he still had the dead
body safe.

He instinctively struck out, but the tearing water, mocking his feeble
efforts, buffeted him this way and that as with the swing of giant arms.
Sometimes he was spun helplessly on the end of his line like a
trolling-spoon. He was flung sideways around a boulder and pressed there
by the hands of the current until it seemed the breath was slowly
leaving his body. Dazed, blinded, gasping, he somehow managed to
struggle over it, and was cast further in-shore. The tendency of the
current was to sweep him in now. If he could only keep alive! The stones
were thicker in-shore. He was beaten first on one side, then the other.
All his conscious efforts were reduced to protecting his head from the
rocks with his arms.

The water may have been but a foot or two deep, but of course he could
gain no footing. He still dragged his leaden burden. All the breath was
knocked out of him under the continual blows, but he was conscious of no
pain. The last few moments were a blank. He found himself in the
back-water, and expended his last ounce of strength in crawling out on
hands and knees on the beach. He cast himself flat, sobbing for breath.

Mary came running to his aid. He was able to nod to her reassuringly,
and in the ecstasy of her relief, she sat down suddenly, and wept like a
white woman. Stonor gathered himself together and sat up groaning. The
onset of pain was well-nigh unendurable. He felt literally as if his
flesh all over had been pounded to a jelly. But all his limbs,
fortunately, responded to their functions.

"Lie still," Mary begged of him.

He shook his head. "I must keep moving, or I'll become as helpless as a
log."

The nameless thing was floating in the back-water. Together they dragged
it out on the stones. It was Stonor's first sight of that which had cost
him such pains to secure. He nerved himself to bear it. Mary was no fine
lady, but she turned her head away. The man's face was totally
unrecognizable by reason of the battering it had received on the rocks;
his clothes were partly in ribbons; there was a gaping wound in the
breast.

For the rest, as far as Stonor could judge, it was the body of a young
man, and a come