Now little by little the flight slackened. Longer intervals ensued between the visits to the decoys. The sky was occasionally quite clear of ducks, so that for a few moments Mr. Kincaid and Bobby would rise to stretch their legs. Always they kept a sharp lookout in all directions, and at the first sight of game, even so far away in the sky it looked like a flock of specks, they would drop down into concealment. This was something Bobby could do; and he was always overjoyed when he caught sight of the ducks first; and could say "mark east"—or west or whatever it was—as Mr. Kincaid taught him.
Sometimes the ducks passed far away; but again the direction of their flight brought them within hearing distance of the blind. Then Mr. Kincaid produced his duck-call, and uttered through it the most natural duck sounds.
"Quack!" it said sharply, and then after the briefest possible pause. "Quok-quok-quok-quok-quok!" in increasing rapidity. It was quite remarkable to observe how the flock, apparently with a fixed destination of its own, would hesitate, waver, finally swing down to investigate. At this, Mr. Kincaid's call became confidential and intimate. It uttered all sorts of clucks and half-notes, telling, probably, of the manifold advantages of feed and shelter offered by this particular pond. Then came the slow circles ending with the final breathless, level-winged rush.
But presently, as the sun mounted higher and higher, even these flights ceased. Mr. Kincaid lit his pipe. Curly made trip after trip, carrying in the game.
"Fun?" enquired Mr. Kincaid succinctly.
"I should think so!" breathed Bobby with rapture.
They sat opposite each other in the sociable silence that seemed to come so easily to them. The wind had risen again, until now it had once more attained the proportions of a respectable gale. Bobby liked to watch the brisk puffs as they hit, spread in a fan-shaped ruffle of dark water and skittered away. In the miniature wavelets possible under the lea, the decoys bobbed gravely, swinging to their anchor strings. The sun flashed from their backs, and from the little waves. All about were the tall stalks of reeds; and ahead, where the open water was, grew tufts of grasses that looked silvery-brown and somehow intimate when, as now, Bobby looked at them from their own plane of elevation. They waved and bent before the wind, and the reeds across the pond bowed and recovered; and over the low, flat landscape seemed to hover a brown, untamed spirit of wildness.
But, though the wind blew a gale, the duck-boat was so snugly hidden that hardly a breath reached its occupants. The warm rays of the sun shone full down upon them, first driving the early chill from Bobby's bones, then making him sleepy. He fell into a delicious lethargy, running over drowsily the small details of his immediate surroundings. In the course of a few hours this cosy nest which he had never seen before had become strangely familiar. He experienced a sense of personal acquaintanceship with many of the individual reeds; he recognized, as one recognizes an accustomed landscape, the angle at which certain clumps crossed one another; or the vistas allowed by the different interstices. A marsh wren had business among the galleries. Bobby watched it hop in and out of sight, sometimes right side up, sometimes upside down. A dozen times he thought it had gone; but always it came back, flirting its absurd short tail, one bright eye fixed on the occupants of the blind. When Bobby slipped still further into the warm bright land of laziness, he abandoned even the effort of observation, and amused himself by sifting rainbows through his eye-lashes.
"Bobby!" whispered Mr. Kincaid sharply.
He came to with a start, rapping his knee against the gunwale of the boat. Mr. Kincaid held his hand up warningly, then pointed toward the decoys. Bobby looked, and saw, preening its feathers calmly, a live duck rising to the wavelets. Mr. Kincaid handed over two 22-short cartridges.