“I reckon he’d kick me off’n the place, if he was big enough,” answered Barr, “and the law wouldn’t tech him for it; but if he should come over to my shanty and tell me that I must quit shooting ducks, and I should take him by the collar and show him the way down the beach to his boat, he’d have me arrested for ’sault and battery. I don’t see no sense in such laws.”
“There’s no justice in them, certainly,” Jones remarked. “Now how do you shoot this thing?”
“You saw that little lead-colored skiff on board Barr’s sloop, didn’t you?” asked Enoch, in reply. “Well, that skiff can be navigated in the water, or put on runners and shoved over the ice. The stock of this gun is braced against a block in the bow, so that the recoil sends the boat back through the water. If the skiff should happen to get foul of a log or a cake of ice, so that it could not move, it would be kicked all to pieces. One fair shot at a flock is all a man can reasonably expect to get in one night; if he gets two, he’s rich.”
When Lester and Jones had examined the big gun to their satisfaction, Barr put it back in its hiding-place, and scattered a few chunks of wood carelessly around the base of the log so that the hollow was partly concealed. Then they went slowly back to the cabin, arriving there just in time to see the Magpie (that was the name of the police-boat which carried off one of Barr’s big guns the day before) turn her bow toward the creek, as if she intended to make a landing there. Barr gave utterance to some heavy adjectives and then went into his cabin, from which he presently emerged with a bag over his shoulder and a forked stick in his hand. Lester and Jones, who began to feel the weight of the secret with which they had been intrusted, looked frightened, but Enoch was as cool as a cucumber.
“You fellows keep quiet and let Barr and me do the talking,” said he, as he seated himself on the bench beside the door. “We have come here after terrapins, and Barr is just going out to catch some for us. That’s what he’s got his bag and stick for.”
But Barr did not go out after terrapins. He only made preparations to go, so that he could readily account for the presence of his visitors in case the officers demanded to know why they were there.
The Magpie ran into the creek and stopped alongside the sloop to which the sink-boat was made fast; but they couldn’t touch that, Enoch said, because Barr was a licensed gunner as well as an illegal one. Barr himself knew better, but still he pretended to be very much surprised and angry when he saw an officer board the sloop, cast off the painter with which the sink-boat was made fast, and toss it to a man who was standing on the steamer’s forecastle.
“What are you about there?” he demanded, in savage tones. “You don’t want to handle things with so much looseness, or you may run against a snag, the first thing you know.”
“If you will send off that canoe so that I can get ashore, I will tell you what I am doing, and why I am doing it,” answered the officer, with the most provoking coolness.
“Well, I won’t do it,” was Barr’s reply. “Nobody wants you ashore, but if you are bound to come, you can call away one of your own boats.”