But I gave him no attention and still looked out at the pond.
So then he remarked bitterly: “I suppose ducks crow back East—or bark.”
He was perfectly welcome to all the satire he could invent; I was not to be turned from my curiosity about the clamor in the water outside, and as I watched I said aloud: “There’s something behind it.”
This brought him to the window, where, as he stood silent beside me, I could feel his impatience as definitely as if it had been a radiator. The matter was that he had his mind running on something and I had my mind running on something—and they weren’t the same things; and each of us wished the other to be interested in his own thing.
“Something behind it,” echoed Scipio slightingly. “Behind every quack you’ll find a duck.”
To this I returned no answer.
“Maybe they have forgot themselves and laid eggs in the water,” suggested Scipio.
“Do your Western ducks lay much in September?” I inquired, with chill.
The noise in the pond, which had died down for an instant, was now set up again—loud, remonstrant, voluble; the two birds sat in the middle of the water and lifted up their heads and screamed to the sky.
“That’s what they’ve done,” said Scipio; “and they can’t locate the eggs. Well, it’d make me holler too. Say,” he pleaded, “what’s the point in your point, anyhow? I want to show you about those game laws.”