"Two," said Mr. Kincaid in his natural voice.
"Kneel around to face the decoys, Bobby, and you can see. But when I say 'mark,' don't move by a hair's breadth."
Bobby shifted position and found that he could see quite easily through the interstices of the reeds. On the pond, silvered bright by the increasing day, the decoys floated snugly. Even at close range Bobby was surprised at their life-like appearance. Among them floated two ducks, white bellies to the sky. This was all Bobby had time to observe for the moment.
"Mark!" warned Mr. Kincaid behind him.
A tremendous tenseness fell on the world. Bobby's muscles stiffened to the point of aching. The limited vista bounded on right and left by the sidewise movement of his eyeballs, and above by the brim of his cap contained nothing. He did not dare extend this vista by so much as one inch. But in the air sounded that magic soul-stirring whistle of wings, now gaining in volume until it seemed overhead; now fading until Bobby thought surely the ducks must have become suspicious and left.
And then, low to the reeds across the pond, a long deliberate flight of black bodies against the sky came into sight at the left, slanted across the field of his vision and disappeared to the right. Their wings were set, and every instant Bobby expected to hear the splash of water that should indicate their alighting. But Mr. Kincaid's figure held its immobility. He knew that the wily old mallards were not yet satisfied. Indeed at the last moment, instead of swinging in, they arose with a sudden swift effort, and resumed the slow scrutinizing circle about the pond.
Bobby lived an eternity in the next few moments. His neck muscles grew stiff; his eyeballs strained from a constant attempt to see farther to one side than nature had intended him to see. Each circle he followed visually as far as he could, and then aurally, his hopes arising and falling as the whistling of the wings sounded near or far. And each circle was lower than its predecessor, until at last the flight swung scarcely twenty feet above the tops of the reeds.
Then, quite unexpectedly to Bobby, and when at its farthest from the blind, the flock turned in and headed directly for him, its wings set.
Bobby caught his breath, and his heart commenced to thump violently. Not a bird of them all seemed to move, and yet with the rush of a railroad train each individual grew in size like magic. It was just like coasting—the same breathless headlong feeling—that quivering avalanche of ducks projected at his head so abruptly and so swiftly that he hardly had time to wink. Nearer and nearer they came, larger and larger they grew. Something inside him seemed to expand like a bubble with their approach; like a bubble too rapidly blown, so that at once, without warning, the bursting point seemed to be reached. Instinctively Bobby shrank back. The moment of collision was imminent. Nothing could stop this headlong flight of living arrows launched against his very face. And then, in a flash, the appearance of the flock changed. As though at a preconcerted signal each duck dropped his legs, threw back his head, opposed to momentum the breadth of his wings and tail. An indescribable and sudden rushing sound smote the air. The flock, its course arrested, hung motionless above the decoys in the attitude of alighting.
At this precise instant Mr. Kincaid, without haste, smoothly got to his feet. Involuntarily Bobby arose also. Curly, who up to this instant had even kept his yellow eyes closed, put his forepaws on the gunwale, and craned his neck upward the better to see.