He departed stealthily through the undergrowth, and Blackie crouched waiting behind his glaring lamp. For ten or fifteen minutes he heard nothing but the sweet whistles of the whippoorwill and the timid twilight noises of the woods. Then from the front came a series of halloos and the crackling of a body passing through the brush. McNulty’s voice was raised in the beater’s call, advancing swiftly toward him. The boy clucked as he had been told. There was a whirr like that of wings, and a flashing shadow in the bright beam of the light. Blackie fell forward on his bag, sure that some wild thing was struggling among its folds.
“Get any?” asked McNulty, rushing up with a long stick in his hand. “Here—let me take a look—careful now! Don’t let him out, whatever you do! Easy—I’ll hold it, and you reach down and pull him out. Don’t be scared—they just peck you a little bit.”
Gingerly, and not at all sure that he would like to be pecked by a sharp bill even a little bit, Blackie put his arm in the bag and felt about. His fingers closed on something, and hastily he jerked it forth. Instead of a struggling mass of feathers, his hand held only a bunch of tangled grass and twigs.
Sax McNulty snorted in disgust. “Thought you had a snipe! Huh! Here I drove a whole covey of them right at you! Didn’t you see them?”
“Yes, I thought I saw one fly right into the bag! How did this get here?”
“You ought to know. Well, guess I’ll have to go through it all again—and it’s no fun beating these bushes. I’m all scratched up already. If you don’t have better luck this time, we’ll have to go somewhere else. I’ll have to go almost to the top of the mountain as it is—I’ve already covered the ground near here.”
He moved away and disappeared into the July night. Blackie settled himself for a long wait.
It was lonely there in the woods. He thought over one by one every incident that had happened since he had landed in camp. Already four days of his slender two weeks at Lenape had passed; only ten days more and he would have to return to the hot city, far from the exciting adventures of forest and lake and lodge.
It seemed to him that hours had passed since Sax had left him. He listened with all his might to try and pick up the leader’s shouting off in the silent woods. Mosquitoes, attracted by the light, swarmed about him and made him miserable with their tormenting hum; he slapped at them, but still they came to sting his neck and wrists and ankles. He would have turned off the light, but knew that if he did so he would miss his chance of bringing in any snipe; and he was determined not to return to camp without at least one bird. By this time many of the new boys should have captured their prey; and he could not think of returning empty-handed. Why didn’t McNulty return?
Gradually it dawned upon him that the leader would not return, that he had not intended to return. It must all be a joke! Just another of those innumerable hoaxes which camp custom had decreed should be played upon all tenderfoot campers during the first days of their first season under canvas. It must be just a conspiracy among the experienced campers and leaders to decoy the credulous greenhorns out into the woods alone under the pretext of a hunt for snipe. With a bag and lantern! The whole story seemed so impossible to him that he wondered how he could have been taken in by it. Sitting behind a pile of stones and a gaping potato-sack, cooing and waiting for birds to fly his way! McNulty must have bundled up grass and twigs into a ball and thrown it into the bag when he had approached on the pretense of “beating” the birds toward the light. And how he and the rest of the knowing ones would laugh at Blackie when he returned to camp, shamefaced and abashed at having been hoodwinked by such a ridiculous flimflam! Snipe that laid cube-shaped eggs!