Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/238

 man, and found money, a watch, and other treasures. He stripped the corpse and threw it overboard,

"Theh!" he said. "I knowed I'd git that man sometime. Lawse. They don't any man want to treat Mr. Storit mean, no, suh! If they does, they gits what's comin' to them. Hi-i! This yeahs a dandy little motorboat. Ha! Ha!"

He began to pace up and down the narrow cockpit. He looked over his shoulder. He no longer steered the craft, though the motor was still going. Something had gone wrong with his head again.

With a loud cry, a rattling laugh, he ran aft, leaped up on the stern lightly, and curving into the air, he plunged deep into the river. He rose like an alligator gar and began to swim with long, fine strokes. He struck out of the current into an eddy, and climbed the bank to enter the woods.

He went through the woods till he arrived at the levee. There he tramped toward the south, singing. At the first town he went down into the streets and stopping a man, asked for two bits to buy something to eat. He was wandering around town when the sheriff, in a ferry launch, towed a gasolene boat and a hog pen on a raft down to the landing.

A crowd looked at the two boats curiously, for the gasolene boat's cockpit was stained with blood. As the sheriff declared: