Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/97

 The fellow turned and displayed a face with little, frightened, stone-coloured eyes; bristling, unshaven countenance; long, shaggy gray hair; narrow, crooked shoulders, and long bony hands.

"Yes, I'll know you when I meet you; I'll know your voice at night and your face by day," Murdong decided. "Cut loose!"

The man gave two twitches at two pieces of trot line, and the canoe—a hollowed log canoe—drifted free from the skiff.

"Now paddle for your life!" Murdong ordered.

The river man slapped his paddle into the current, like a scared and diving muskrat, gave a quick thrust, then another thrust, and where he had been the fog swirled in and the thief was gone. Murdong heard him paddling swiftly away with receding sounds when the appalling silence of a Mississippi river fog in the midnight settled upon him.

Not a sound, not a motion, except wreathing wisps and rags of fog, and coiling surface waters, broke the dark and gloom. When he doused the flash Murdong felt as though the skies might fall down upon him. A more awesome gloom he had never felt before in his life. It fairly seemed to smother—it even gave him a sensation of being crushed.

There did not seem to be anything he could do to escape. He could not tell which was up, down, or