CHAPTER XV
A MINOR CASTS HALF A VOTE
March came in like neither a lion nor a lamb, but was scarcely a week old before the wild ducks had begun to score the sky above Bronson’s Slew looking for open water and badly-harvested corn-fields. Wild geese, too, honked from on high as if in wonder that these great prairies on which their forefathers had been wont fearlessly to alight had been changed into a disgusting expanse of farms. If geese are favored with the long lives in which fable bids us believe, some of these venerable honkers must have seen every vernal and autumnal phase of the transformation from boundless prairie to boundless corn-land. I sometimes seem to hear in the bewildering trumpetings of wild geese a cry of surprise and protest at the ruin of their former paradise. Colonel Woodruff’s hired man, Pete, had no such foolish notions, however. He stopped Newton Bronson and Raymond Simms as they tramped across the colonel’s pasture, gun in hand, trying to make themselves believe that the shooting was good.
“This ain’t no country to hunt in,” said he. “Did either of you fellows ever have any real duck-shooting?”
“The mountings,” said Raymond, “air poor places for ducks.”
“Not big enough water,” suggested Pete. “Some wood-ducks, I suppose?”
“Along the creeks and rivers, yes seh,” said Raymond, “and sometimes a flock of wild geese would get lost, and some bewildered, and a man would shoot one or two—from the tops of the ridges—but nothing to depend on.”
“I’ve never been nowhere,” said Newton, “except once to Minnesota—and—and that wasn’t in the shooting season.”