Ha! the desperate victim has the best of it; gripe harder, Jennings; she has twisted her fingers in your neckcloth, and you yourself are choking:  fool! squeeze the swallow, can’t you? try to make your fingers meet in the middle—­lower down, lower down, grasp the gullet, not the ears, man—­that’s right; I told you so:  tighter, tighter, tighter! again; ha, ha, ha, bravo! bravo!—­tighter, tighter, tighter!

At length the hideous fight was coming to an end—­though a hungry constrictor, battling with the huge rhinoceros, and crushing his mailed ribs beneath its folds, could not have been so fierce or fearful; fewer now, and fainter are her struggles; that face is livid blue—­the eyes have started out, and goggle horribly; the tongue protrudes, swollen and black.  Aha! there is another convulsive effort—­how strong she is still! can you hold her, Simon?—­can he?—­All the fiend possessed him now with savage exultation:  can he?—­only look! gripe, gripe still, you are conquering, strong man! she is getting weaker, weaker; here is your reward, gold! gold! a mighty store uncounted; one more grasp, and it is all your own—­relent now, she hangs you.  Come, make short work of it, break her neck—­gripe harder—­back with her, back with here against the bedstead:  keep her down, down I say—­she must not rise again.  Crack! went a little something in her neck—­did you hear it?  There’s the death-rattle, the last smothery complicated gasp—­what, didn’t you hear that?

And the devil congratulated Simon on his victory.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE REWARD.

TILL the wretch had done the deed, he scarcely knew that it was doing.  It was a horrid, mad excitement, where the soul had spread its wings upon the whirlwind, and heeded not whither it was hurried.  A terrible necessity had seemed to spur him onwards all the while, and one thing so succeeded to another, that he scarce could stop at any but the first.  From the moment he had hidden in the shower-bath (but for God’s interposing mercy), his doom appeared to have been sealed—­robbery, murder, false witness, and—­damnation!

Crime is the rushing rapid, which, but for some kind miracle, inevitably carries on through circling eddies, and a foamy swinging tide, to the cataract of death and wo:  haste, poor fisherman of Erie, paddle hard back, stem the torrent, cling to the shore, hold on tight by this friendly bough; know you not whither the headlong current drives? hear you not the roar of many waters, the maddening rush as of an ocean disenthralled? feel you not the earth trembling at the thunder—­see you not the heaven clouded o’er with spray?  Helpless wretch—­thy frail canoe has leapt that dizzy water-cliff, Niagara!