nd end the whole search for that twenty thousand dollars
quickly? End it all so quietly that the one who had played him false
would never be conscious of the outcome?

No, that was not the plan Murky chose to follow. It might result in his
obtaining the prize he sought, but he desired more. He wanted revenge.
He wanted Grandall to know, too, that he _was_ avenged,--would have him
fully realize that it was Murky,--Murky whom he had tricked and deceived,
that had found him out and vanquished him at last.

Daylight was necessary to the tramp's plan. He wanted Grandall to see and
recognize him. He pictured in his mind how, when suddenly awakened, the
trickster should find looking down into his face a pair of eyes that were
sharper and just as unmerciful as his own. Then he would speak, make sure
he was known--strike quickly and effectively, and be gone.

He would not commit murder--unless obliged to do so; it might make
trouble. But he would leave Grandall so hopelessly senseless that there
would be no possibility of early pursuit from that quarter, as there
would probably be none from any other.

Oh, they were black, black thoughts that coursed in Murky's mind!--hardly
the thoughts that should come to a man in his last night on earth. But
they were very pleasing to the tramp. With a kind of wild, wolfish relish,
he pondered over the details of his plan.

Satisfied that Grandall would not leave the clubhouse before morning,
confident of his own ability to awaken at the slightest sound of footsteps
near, and resolving to be astir before daybreak, anyway, if he were not
disturbed earlier, which he regarded as quite improbable, the scowling
wretch allowed his eyes to close.

Even in sleep Murky's face bore an expression little short of fiendish.
He was lying quite under the thick foliage of the bushes. They screened
him from view and from the breeze that had sprung up out of the west. But
also they screened from his eyes the glow that now lit up the heavens, in
the distance, for miles around.

It was the smoke, strong in his nostrils, that at last startled the
fellow into sudden wakefulness. He had been too long a woodsman, had
had too thorough a knowledge of the great forests in his earlier, better
days, not to know instantly what it meant. He sprang up and looked about.
The course of the wind was such, he reasoned, that the fire would not
reach this particular vicinity. But what if it should? Why, so much
the better,