It was nearly half an hour before the boys heard Cal’s shoutings in the distance, but slowly coming nearer. After that, in the eager watching and waiting, the seconds seemed minutes, and the minutes dragged themselves out into what seemed hours.
At last, however, Dick heard the deer breaking through bushes just ahead of him. In another second the frightened creature burst into view and Dick fired, missing the game, which instantly changed its course and ran away toward its left, with the speed of the wind. Dick, in his excited disappointment, fired his second barrel at a hopelessly long range.
Almost immediately he heard a shot from Tom’s gun, and after that all was still. Cal struggled out of the swamp, while Larry and Dick made their way toward Tom’s post, “to hear,” Cal said, “just what excuses the novices have invented on the spur of the moment by way of accounting for their bad marksmanship.”
“I have none to offer,” said Dick, manfully. “I missed my shot, that’s all.”
“How is it with you, Tom? What plea have you to offer?”
“None whatever,” answered Tom. “Yonder lies the deer by the side of the fallen tree. He was taking a flying leap over it when I shot him—on the wing, as it were.”
The congratulations that followed this complete surprise may be imagined. Cal fairly “wreaked himself upon expression” in sounding his praises of Tom’s superb marksmanship, and better still, his coolness and calmness under circumstances, as Cal phrased it, “that might have disturbed the equipoise of an Egyptian mummy’s nerve centres.”
Tom took all this congratulation and extravagance of praise modestly and with as little show of emotion as he had manifested while making his difficult shot.
Perhaps this was even more to his credit than the other. For this was the first time Tom Garnett had ever seen a deer hunt, or a live deer, either, for that matter.