“Poor devil!” he muttered; “I didn’t want your life, but if, as you said, there was only room for one of us, why, you had to go! Brother, eh? Good-bye, dear brother Abel; I’m going to play Cain with a vengeance now; but my mark is on my arm, and not on my brow. Curse it, how it throbs and burns!”
With a low inspiration of the breath he hurriedly threw off his coat, and drew up his shirt-sleeve, for half was torn away in the struggle, and laying bare a great puckered scar upon his arm, it showed red and fiery, probably, though, from injury in the struggle.
“It is nothing, I suppose. One would think he had had the bite, and not I. Rabid as a maddened dog!”
He hastily drew on his coat, shivering with cold and horror.
“That would be horrible,” he muttered, “to go mad like a dog! What a fool I am! I shall stay here till I am taken.”
He glanced sharply round, and then started off at a steady walk, thankful for the coming shades of night, which would hide his disordered apparel.
His figure had hardly grown faint in the distance when a couple of young men crossing the common with rod and basket on their shoulders came upon the prostrate form of John Huish, as they chatted carelessly of the day’s sport.
“Drunk, or a tramp?” said one.
“Both,” said the other carelessly, as he glanced at the figure. “By Jove! Harry, there’s blood. It’s suicide!”
They hurried to the spot, and there was still light enough to display the tokens of the fierce struggle in the trampled turf, and the torn neck of the injured man’s shirt.