To his alarm, Kloon did not sink far. He cut another sapling and pushed the body until only the shoes were visible above the silt.
These, however, were very slowly sinking, now. Bubbles rose, dully iridescent, floated, broke. Strings of blood hung suspended in the clouding water.
Leverett went back to the little ridge and covered with dead leaves the spot where Kloon had lain. There were broken ferns, but he could not straighten them. And there lay Kloon's rifle.
For a while he hesitated, his habits of economy being ingrained; but he remembered the packet in his shirt, and he carried the rifle to the little pool and shoved it, muzzle first, driving it downward, out of sight.
As he rose from the pool's edge, somebody laid a hand on his shoulder.
That was the most real death that Leverett had ever died.
* * * * *
II
A coward died many times before Old Man Death really gets him.
The swimming minutes passed; his mind ceased to live for a space. Then, as through the swirling waters of the last dark whirlpool, a dulled roar of returning consciousness filled his being.