With equal swiftness he dropped it on the sidewalk, growling and gagging at the warm feathers which almost choked him. “Ugh-r-r!” He spurned it with his black nose along the ground, the tiny yellow claws raking up minute spirals of dust.
“There! I knew you wouldn’t eat it,” remarked his master indifferently. “You’re a spoiled pup!” Simultaneously Leon caught sight of the three boys making toward him and burst into a complacent shout of recognition.
“Hullo, Colin! Hullo, Coombsie!” he cried. “See what I’ve got! Six yellow-legs! I fired into a flock; the first I’ve seen this year. They were going from me and I dropped half a dozen of them together, with this old ‘fuzzee’!” He touched an ancient shotgun propped beside him. “I’ve shot quite a number one at a time this week. ”
His left hand went out to a huddle of still quivering feathers on top of the fence in which five pairs of yellow spindle-legs were tangled like slim twigs.
Colin, as was expected of him, burst into an exclamation of wonder at this destructive skill. Coombsie’s admiration was more forced.
Blink, the terrier, scornfully rolled over the feathered thing in the dust. He snapped angrily at the stranger, Nixon Warren, who tried to pick it up and examine it.
“That bird won’t be fit to eat now, after the dog has played with it,” suggested the latter, addressing Leon without the benefit of an introduction.
“I don’t care. Probably I’ll give the whole bunch of yellow-legs away, anyhow—Mother doesn’t like their sedgy flavor. She’d rather I’d let the birds alone, I guess!”
“Why do you shoot so many if you don’t want them?”
“Oh! partly for the sport and partly because these ‘Greater Yellow-legs’ are such telltales that they warn every duck and other bird within hearing by their noisy whistle.”