"I don't guess so. He was workin' mighty hard when he flopped."
"Oh, that's terrible!" Drury groaned. "He must be layin' out there now somewheres—sufferin'. Oh, that's terrible!"
"Aw, what's it your business?" was Crosson's gruff comment. But there was uneasiness in his tone, for Drury had set Irene to wringing her hands nervously, and Crosson felt a trifle uncomfortable himself. Twilight always made him susceptible to emotions that daylight blinded him to, as to the stars. He remembered that boyhood emotion now in his pulpit, and his shoulder-blades twitched; an icy finger seemed to have written something on them. He was casting up his eyes and his hands in a familiar gesture and quoting a familiar text:
"'Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.'"
From the roof of the church he seemed to see that wounded wild duck falling, turning in air, striking at the air frantically with his good wing and feebly with the one that bled. Down he fell, struggling somewhere among the pews.
A fantastic notion drifted into the preacher's mind—that Satan had shot up a bullet from hell and it had lodged among the feathers of Jehovah the protector, and He was falling and lost among that congregation in which so often the preacher had failed to find God.
Doctor Crosson shook his head violently to fling away such madnesses, and he propounded his next "furthermore" with added energy. But he could not shake off the torment in the recollection of Drury Boldin's nagging interest in that wild duck.
II
Drury insisted on knowing where the wild duck fell, and Crosson told him that it was "near where the crick emptied into the sluice, where the cat-tails grew extra high."
He went on home to his supper, but the thought of the suffering bird had seized his mind; it flopped and twisted at the roots of his thoughts.