But, when he went out for his initiation, in the raw blackness before
daybreak, and lay in the blind, with only his guide for a companion, he
felt far away from artificial luxuries. The first pale streamers of
dawn soon streaked the east, and the wind charged cuttingly like drawn
sabers of galloping cavalry. The wooden decoys had been anchored with
the live ducks swimming among them, and the world began to awake. He
drew a long breath of contentment, and waited. Then came the trailing
of gray and blue and green mists, and, following the finger of the
silent boatman, he made out in the northern sky a slender wedge of
black dots, against the spreading rosiness of the horizon. Soon after,
he heard the clear clangor of throats high in the sky, answered by the
nearer honking of the live decoys, and he felt a throbbing of his
pulses as he huddled low against the damp bottom of the blind and waited.
The lines and wedges grew until the sky was stippled with them, and
their strong-throated cries were a strident music. For a time, they
passed in seeming thousands, growing from scarcely visible dots into
speeding shapes with slender outstretched necks and bills, pointed like
reversed compass needles to the south. As yet, they were all flying
high, ignoring with lordly indifference the clamor of their renegade
brothers, who shrieked to them through the morning mists to drop down,
and feed on death.
But, as the day grew older, Samson heard the popping of guns off to
the side, where other gunners lay in other blinds, and presently a
drake veered from his line of flight, far off to the right, harkened to
the voice of temptation, and led his flock circling toward the blind.
Then, with a whir and drumming of dark-tipped wings, they came down,
and struck the water, and the boy from Misery rose up, shooting as he
came. He heard the popping of his guide's gun at his side, and saw the
dead and crippled birds falling about him, amid the noisy clamor of
their started flight.
That day, while the mountaineer was out on the flats, the party of men
at the club had been swelled to a total of six, for in pursuance of the
carefully arranged plans of Mr. Farbish, Mr. Bradburn had succeeded in
inducing Wilfred Horton to run down for a day or two of the sport he
loved. To outward seeming, the trip which the two men had made together
had been quite casual, and the outgrowth of coincidence; yet, in point
of fact, not only the drive from Baltimore in Horton's car, but the
conversation by the way had been in pursuance of a plan, and the result
was that, when Horton arrived that afternoon, he found his usually even
temper ruffled by bits of maliciously broached gossip, until his
resentment against Samson South had been fanned into danger heat. He
did not know that South also was at the club, and he did not that
afternoon go out to the blinds, but so far departed from his usual
custom as to permit himself to sit for hours in the club grill.