So we sat and waited. Bent on more pleasant business, we should have had our guns ready in our hands, waiting for the sound of birds flighting overhead as the moon rose, coming from the sand-banks out at sea inland to the stubbles. But now our ears were tuned to a different music, and I am not ashamed to say that I heard some artery within me beating like a drum.
It was a solemn hour and strange indeed was the business we were upon. The whole marsh was alive with voices. There was the long, hushed roar of the sea, the fifing of the wind, and then the countless cries of the night-birds. A great heron flapped away somewhere over Thirty Main, with its hoarse "frank, frank"; there was a rustling whistle far overhead as a company of widgeon flashed by at thirty miles an hour; a paddle of duck were quacking somewhere on the other side of the creek; and then, faint at first, but growing nearer and nearer, came that sound which, to the wild-fowler, is the finest in the world and which many and many a man and woman has said to be the strangest sound in nature.
The wild geese were coming. I can never think of that sound without a tightening of the muscles, almost a lump in the throat. It is like a vast pack of ghostly hounds up in the sky, which cuts into the night like nothing else can do, and instinctively I felt for my gun. But it was not to be that night. They passed over us not more than eighty yards high—well within the range of a heavy gun—and the noise was deafening in our ears as the great wedge-shaped formation sped by.
"By Jove, that's good!" I heard Bernard whisper.
It was the one chance of the night. No more geese worked our way, and for an hour we sat motionless, growing colder and colder, but patient still.
Then, at last, there was a low whistle and a crouching figure appeared on the edge of the pit.
"I've followed him, sir. He came out of the school with his gun and went straight on to the foreshore. He walked for nearly a mile towards Cockthorpe. I crouched behind the furze bushes and he never saw me. He was walking very fast. He passed the head of Thirty Main and then went down on to the mud, following the bank until he came to the Hulk. The bridge was out and he went on board. Then he pulled it up—and there he is now. I saw a light struck and a candle lit from one of the windows in the side. Then something was pulled over it, and I came away here as fast as I could."
"The Hulk!" I said. "Of course, I might have thought of that before!"
"What is it?" Bernard asked.
"It is the hulk of an old coaster of about eighty tons. It is permanently moored in Thirty Main Creek. Upjelly bought it for twenty pounds some two years ago and has had it fitted up. In the summer he sometimes camps out there. In the winter he uses it as a base for shooting on the marshes. There are three or four on the saltings between Wells and Cromer."