For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional visits to town for another kind of thrill, 177 another sort of excitement. But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as to what they liked, what they didn’t like, what the world would do for them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated, without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance from the world, they waited there rigid, motionless, their hearts thrilling to the increasing music of the march of dawn across the bottoms of the Mississippi.
False dawn flushed and faded almost like a deliberate lightning flash. Then dawn appeared, marking down the gray lines of the wilderness trees with one stroke, sweeping out all the stars with another brush, revealing the flocks of birds glistening against the sky while yet the earth was in shade. The watchers spied a score of birds, great geese far to the northward, coming right in line with them. They waited for a few seconds—ages long. Then one of the men cried:
“They’re stoopin’, boys! They’re comin’!”
The wild geese, coming down a magnificent slant from a mile height, headed straight for Yankee Bar. Will birds never learn? They ploughed down with their wings folding, and poised. Their voices grew louder and louder as they approached.
With a hissing roar of their wings they pounded down out of the great, safe heights and circled around and inward. With a shout the three men started up through their masks and with levelled guns opened fire.
Too late the old gander at the point of the “V” began to climb; too late the older birds in the point screamed and gathered their strength. The river men turned their black muzzles against the necks of the young tail birds of the feathered procession and brought them tumbling down out of the line to the ground, 178 where on the hard sand two of them split their breasts and exposed thick layers of fat dripping with oil.
The cries of the fleeing birds, the echoes of the barking guns, died away. The men shouted their joy in their success, gathered up their victims, scurried pack to cover, brushing over their tracks, and crouched down again, to await another flock.
Hunger drove them to their cabin-boat within an hour. They had thought they wanted to get some more birds, but in fact they knew they had enough. They went over to their boat, cooked up a big breakfast, and sat around the fire smoking and talking it over. They chattered like boys. They were gleeful, innocent, harmless! But only for a time. Then the hunted feeling returned to them. Once more they had a back track to watch and ambushes to be wary of. They wanted to go to Mendova, but again they didn’t want to go there. They didn’t know but what Mendova might be watching for them, the same as Memphis was. Certainly, they determined, they must go to Mendova after dark, and see a friend who would put them wise to actual conditions around town.
They took catnaps, having had too little sleep, and yet they could not sleep deeply. They watched the shanty-boats which dropped down the river at intervals, most of them in the main current close to the far bank, and often hardly visible against the mottled background of caving earth, fallen trees, and flickering mirage. Their restlessness was silent, morose, and one of them was always on the lookout.
Despard himself was on watch in the afternoon. He sat just inside the kitchen door, out of the sunshine, in a comfortable rocking chair. Two windows and the stern door gave him a wide view of the river, sandbars and eddy. It seemed but a minute, but he had fallen 179 into a doze, when the splash of a shanty-boat sweeps awakened all the crew with a sudden, frightened start. Whispers, hardly audible, hailed in alarm. The three, crouching in involuntary doubt and dismay, glared at the newcomer.