Ann's plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aid
her father was simple enough. He who was known to be in pursuit of
Markham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills and
start him on the road at the other side. Markham was little known at The
Mills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constable
to be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so much
agitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few were
stirring. This plan, with such modifications as his own good sense
suggested, Toyner was willing to adopt.
He started earlier in the evening than she had done, having no
particular desire for secrecy. He told his friends that he was going to
row to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he had
gained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best to
report. It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still in
the air.
He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, and
began to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placid
water. His boat was light and well built. He could see few yards of dark
water in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees. The water
was deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all the
haste he could, but rowed on meditatively--he was always more or less
attracted by solitude. To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness,
the absolute loneliness, were greater rest to him than sleep would have
been. In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; his
mind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing his
thoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may be
called prayer.
Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly if
he can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior being
that a child feels to a grown man. Toyner expressed his grievance over
and over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to God that he
could not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so very
much, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, he
should be given over to the damning power of circumstance, launched in a
career of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greater
scorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually, as it
appeared to him, more worthy of scorn.
He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gained
therefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven.
The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mist
was arising from the water on all sides. It was not so thick but that he
could see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light came
he found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which he
looked. The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous in
itself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances looked
greater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with which
he was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar.
When Toyner realised what the full effect of the moonlight was going to
be, he dropped his oars and sat still for a few minutes, wondering if
he would be able to find the landmarks that were necessary, so strange
did the landscape look, so wonderful and gigantic were the shapes which
the dead trees assumed. Then he continued his path, looking for a tree
that was black and blasted by lightning. He was obliged to grope his way
close to the trees; thus his boat bumped once or twice on hidden stumps.
It occurred to him to think what a very lonely place it would be to die
in, and a premonition that he was going to die came across him.
Having found the blasted tree, he counted four fallen trees; they came
at intervals in the outer row of standing ones; then there was a break
in the forest, and he turned his boat into it and paused to listen.
The sound that met his ear--almost the strangest sound that could have
been heard in that place--was that of human speech; it was still some
distance away, but he heard a voice raised in angry excitement,
supplicating, threatening, defying, and complaining.
Toyner began to row down the untried water-way which was opened to his
boat. The idea that any one had found Markham in such a place and at
such an hour was too extraordinary to be credited. Toyner looked eagerly
into the mist. He could see nothing but queer-shaped gulfs of light
between trunks and branches. Again his boat rubbed unexpectedly against
a stump, and again the strange premonition of approaching death came
over him. For a moment he thought that his wisest course would be to
return. Then he decided to go forward; but before obeying this command,
his mind gave one of those sudden self-attentive flashes the capacity
for which marks off the mind of the reflective type from others. He saw
himself as he sat there, his whole appearance and dress; he took in his
history, and the place to which that hour had brought him, he, Bart
Toyner, a thin, somewhat drooping, middle-aged man, unsuccessful,
because of his self-indulgence, in all that he had attempted, yet having
carried about with him always high desires, which had never had the
slightest realisation except in the one clear shining space of vision
and victory which had been his for a few months and now was gone. The
light had mocked him; now perhaps he was going to die!
He pushed his boat on, his sensations melting into an excited blank of
thought in which curiosity was alone apparent. He was growing strangely
excited after his long calm despondency; no doubt the excitement of the
other, who was shouting and jabbering not far away in the moonlit
night, affected him.
He found his way through the trees of the opening; evidently the splash
of his oar was caught by the owner of the noisy voice, for before he
could see any one a silence succeeded to the noise, a sudden absolute
silence, in itself shocking.
"Are you there, Markham?" cried Toyner.
No answer.
Toyner peered into the silver mist on all sides of him; the sensation of
the diffused moonlight was almost dazzling, the trees looked far away,
large and unreal. At length among them he saw the great log that had
fallen almost horizontal with the water; upon it a solitary human figure
stood erect in an attitude of frenzied defiance.
"I have come from your daughter, Markham." Then in a moment, by way of
self-explanation, he said, "Toyner."
The man addressed only flung a clenched fist into the air. The silence
of his pantomime now that there was some one to speak to was made
ghastly by the harangue which he had been pouring out upon the solitude.
"Have you lost your head?" asked Toyner. "I have come from your
daughter--I'm not going to arrest you, but set you down at The
Mills--you can go where you will then."
He knew now the answer to his first question. The man before him was in
some stage of delirium. Toyner wondered if any one could secretly have
brought him drink.
There was nothing to be done but to soothe as best he could the other's
fear and enmity, and to bring the boat close to the tree for him to get
in it. Whether he was sane or mad, it was clearly necessary to take him
from that place. Markham retained a sullen silence, but seemed to
understand so far that he ceased all threatening gestures. His only
movements were certain turnings and sudden crouchings as if he saw or
felt enemies about him in the air.
"Now, get in," said Toyner. He had secured the boat. He pulled the other
by the legs, and guided him as he slipped from his low bench. "Sit down;
you can't stand, you know."
But Markham showed himself able to keep his balance, and alert to help
in pushing off the boat. There was a heavy boat-pole ready for use in
shallow water, and Markham for a minute handled it adroitly, pushing off
from his tree.
Toyner turned his head perforce to see that the boat was not proceeding
towards some other dangerous obstacle. Then Markham, with the sudden
swift cunning of madness, lifted the butt end of his pole and struck him
on the head.
Toyner sank beneath the blow as an ox shivers and sinks under the
well-aimed blow of the butcher.
Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph,
looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but all
around in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many.
No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted next
over the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to work
changing garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of the
boat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coat
and hat, to the horizontal log on which he had lived for so long. He
took the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought to
be a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to the
upright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additional
touch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the ample
bag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it on
Toyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away with
reckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering with
that unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform a
dangerous feat.
The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nook
in the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In the
open river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlit
water and the still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streak
up the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around Fentown
Falls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at his
oars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At every
stroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars made
soft echoes far and wide.