"Why," said he, "when I started out this afternoon I skirted along that big swamp, where you hunted in the morning, and I saw where four deer had crossed your track since you went along. One of them was an awful big buck. I took up his trail and followed it in hopes of overtaking him and getting a shot. He roamed and circled around among the hills and through the swamps for, I reckon, more than five miles. I walked just as still as I possibly could, for I knew we were mighty nigh out of meat, and I am gettin' mighty tired of bacon anyhow. But somehow that buck heard me or smelt me, or something, and the first and last I saw of him was just one flip of his tail as he went over a ridge about three hundred yards away. I sat down on a log and waited and studied a long time what to do or where to go next; and finally I concluded I'd just come in and get supper ready by the time you got here. Set up, sir, and have a cup of coffee and some of these baked potatoes and some of this bacon. It ain't much of a supper, but maybe we'll feel a little better after we eat it, anyway."
I surrounded one side of the rough pine table suddenly, and when I got my mouth so full I couldn't talk plain, I said, in a careless, uninterested sort of a way:
"I saw where you sat down on that log."
"Did you?"
"Yes; I sat down and rested there, too. I was just about as tired and as disgusted and as mad as I am now; but after sitting there ten or fifteen minutes, I trudged along through that maple thicket just below there, and when I got through it I saw a big buck smelling along on a doe's track, up on the side-hill, and I killed him and then started on after the doe, and——"
Pease had dropped his knife and fork and was looking at me with his mouth half open and his eyes half shut.
"What did you say?" he inquired in a dazed, half-whispered tone.
"I say I killed the buck and then started——"
"You killed a buck?"
"Yes."