The next instant he laid down the shell, slipped to his door and caught up the gun that lay inside, on a shelf of the rude scantling. A wood duck had appeared over the lower tree tops, flying languidly to its nest, somewhere in the foothills. Long before it reached the wood’s edge, the Inger was in his doorway. The bird’s heavy flight led straight across the clearing. One moment the big body came sailing above the hut, then it seemed to go out in a dozen ugly angles and dropped like a stone to the edge of the garden. It lay fluttering strongly when the Inger reached it. He lifted and examined it approvingly. One wing was shot almost clear of the body. That was the mark he liked to make. He swung the bird under his arm, took out his jack-knife, pried open the mouth, slit the long tongue, tied the feet together and hung it outside his door to bleed to death. This death, he had heard, improved the flavor.
Without washing his hands, he prepared his supper—salt pork and bacon fried together, corn cakes soaked in the gravy, and coffee. The fire glowed in the hollow of the great rock, and the smell of the cooking crept about. The Inger was almost ready to eat by the clear light of the transparent sky, when he saw a figure coming across the clearing.
He leapt for his rifle—since the last sheriff had been shot he was never perfectly at ease with any stranger. But before his hand had closed, it relaxed at the sound of a triple whistle. He wheeled and looked again. The stranger had almost reached the bourne of the firelight.
“Blast my bones and blast me!” cried the Inger. “Dad!”
Something deep and big had come in his voice. As the two men met and shook hands, there was a gladness in them both. They moved apart in a minute, the Inger took the pack which the older man swung off, and went about cutting more salt pork and bacon. His father found the wash basin, and washed, breathing noisily through the water cupped in his hands. Not much was said, but any one would have known that the two were glad of the moment.
“Not much grub,” said his father. “I ain’t grub hungry,” and flung himself on the ground before the camp fire. “I’m dead beat—and my bones ache,” he added.
The Inger filled his father’s plate and went on frying meat. In the firelight, their faces looked alike. The older man’s skin was beginning to draw tightly, showing the rugged modelling of the thick bones. His huge hands looked loose and ineffectual. Something welled up and flooded the Inger when he saw his father’s hand tremble as it lifted his tin cup.
Larger in scale, more definite in drawing, and triumphantly younger the Inger was, brown skinned, level eyed, and deep chested, his naked, veined right arm grasping the handle of the skillet as if it were a battering ram. When the Inger registered in the inn at Inch or signed a check in his bank in the City, his pen bit through the paper like acid, because he did everything as if his tool were a battering ram. But his eyes, as they rested now on his father’s hand that trembled, were soft and mute, like a dog’s eyes.
“What kind of luck, Dad?” he said.
The older man looked across his wooden platter and smiled whimsically.