"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.