Joslin had known what held the body of James Haddon fast. Carried deep down outward by the side current, Haddon had felt something floating down there, had caught at it—a thing no larger than the straw at which a drowning man will clutch. It was no larger than a straw—the thick cord of a fisherman’s heavy set-line, armed with hooks depending on short lines—two score hooks or more, each of them a man-trap in such waters. As he had grasped at this line the current had carried him on down. The first hook had impaled him, passing entirely through the palm of his hand. He swung without any possibility of escape. Below him somewhere two or more heavy catfish were tugging at the line, themselves impaled without hope of escape.
All these things had caused what Joslin had seen—the strange swaying of the man’s body back and forth there below the surface.
And Joslin knew by the time the body had reached the foot of the pool, by the time he had cut loose the remaining line and dragged the body up on the beach below, that all hope was long since gone for James Haddon.
Weakly now and inefficiently he did what he could to try to revive life in the victim, but the bluish-purple face, the wide-open mouth, the staring eyes, told him well enough the truth.
Joslin rose after a time. The woman was standing there still, her hands at the side of her face, staring. He knew that she must know.
The boat was gone. Joslin looked down the stream. He saw it on his side of the river, by freak of the stream grounded on the bar which made out from the point. He hastened to the boat, waded out, caught it, and with the oars by chance left in the boat made his way upstream to the foot of the pool. With difficulty he got into the bottom of the boat the heavy body of the dead man.
He did not speak at all when at length the boat lay once more along shore on the left-hand bank, below the flat ledge on which Marcia Haddon stood. He caught the painter now around the stump of a gnarled cedar near the edge, and so turned toward her at last, facing the hardest of all this grievous task.
She stepped slowly, horror-smitten, toward the brink, her hands at her temples. Joslin held her by the arm as she looked down into the swaying boat. The face of her husband stared up at her—bluish-white, the thickened lips open, the eyes staring.
“You must go away,” said Joslin at last.—“Go over there in the brush and sit down. I’ll have to drop the boat down.”