Blue-Bird Weather

"Fine!" he whispered. "Splendid! I'm glad you didn't kill him."

"I'm glad I didn't have to," she said.

"Do you think you could have?"

She turned toward him, wondering whether he might be serious; then

smiled as he smiled.

At the same instant, coming apparently from nowhere, four canvasbacks

suddenly appeared over the clamoring decoys, so close in that, as they

came driving by the blind and rose slightly, wings bowed, Marche could

almost see their beady little eyes set in the chestnut red of the

turning heads. Mechanically his gun spoke twice; rap-rap, echoed Miss

Herold's gun, and splash! splash! down whirled two gray-and-red ducks;

then a third, uncertain, slowed down, far out beyond the decoys, and

slanted sideways to the water. The fourth went on.

"Duffer that I am," said Marche good-humoredly. "That was a clean double

of yours, Miss Herold!--clean-cut work."

She said, slightly knitting her straight brows: "I should have crossed

two of them and killed the one you missed. I think I'd better get the

boat."

"No, I'll go out after that kicker," he said, ashamed of his slovenly

work.

Five minutes later he returned with his kicker and her two ducks--great,

fat, heavy canvasbacks, beautiful in their red, black, and drab plumage.

"What about blue-bird weather, now?" he laughed.

But she only smiled and said, "I'm very much afraid."

For a long while they sat there, alert behind their wall of rustling

reeds, watching sky and water. False alarms were not infrequent from

their decoys. Sometimes the outbreak of quacking and honking was

occasioned by some wandering gull, sometimes by a circling hawk or some

eagle loitering in mid-heaven on broad and leisurely wings, reluctant to

remain, unwilling to go; sometimes to a pair or two of widgeon or

pintails speeding eastward high in the blue. But the sparkling,

cloudless hours sped away, and no duck or goose or swan invaded the

vicinity. Only one sly old black duck dropped into the reeds far back on

the island; and Marche went after him with serious designs upon his

fraudulent old life.

When the young man returned, twenty minutes later, perfectly innocent of

duck murder, he found the girl curled up in her corner of the pit, eyes

closed, tired little head cradled in the curve of her left arm. She

waked as he slid into the blind, and smiled at him, pretending not to

have been asleep.

"Did you get him?"

"No. He went off at two hundred yards."