One loud cry, now--but the resistless water bore him down
before he could give it utterance, and, driving him under it,
carried away a corpse.
It toyed and sported with its ghastly freight, now bruising it
against the slimy piles, now hiding it in mud or long rank grass,
now dragging it heavily over rough stones and gravel, now feigning
to yield it to its own element, and in the same action luring it
away, until, tired of the ugly plaything, it flung it on a swamp--
a dismal place where pirates had swung in chains through many a
wintry night--and left it there to bleach.
And there it lay alone. The sky was red with flame, and the water
that bore it there had been tinged with the sullen light as it
flowed along. The place the deserted carcass had left so recently,
a living man, was now a blazing ruin. There was something of the
glare upon its face. The hair, stirred by the damp breeze, played
in a kind of mockery of death--such a mockery as the dead man
himself would have delighted in when alive--about its head, and
its dress fluttered idly in the night wind.
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