We were just in time—a dozen mallards were coming straight for our decoys.
Bang! thundered the curé's gun.
Bang! Bang! echoed my own. Then another roar from the curé's left barrel. When the smoke cleared three fat ducks were kicking beyond our deceivers.
"Take him!" he cried, as a straggler—a drake—shot past us. I snapped in a shell and missed, but the curé was surer. Down came the straggler, a dead duck at sixty yards.
"Bravo, Monsieur le Curé!" I cried.
But he only smiled modestly and, extracting the empty shell, blew the lurking smoke free from the barrels. It was noon when we turned to half the chicken and a bottle of vin ordinaire with an appetite.
The northeast wind had now shifted to the south; the bay became like glass, and so the afternoon passed until the blood-red sun, like some huge ribbed lantern of the Japanese, slowly sank into the sea. It grew dusk over the desolate marsh. Stray flights of plovers, now that the tide was again on its ebb, began to choose their resting places for the night.
"I'm going out to take a look," said the curé. Again, like some gopher of the prairie, he rose up out of his burrow.
Presently he returned, the old enthusiastic gleam in his eyes.