dunnage of a quiet eddy. Straight into this green clump
glided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunk
of the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains of
rank growth, just as the Baxters had intended it should be hidden, when
days before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waiting
and included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.

There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the late
afternoon to mark their movements--and in a little while Fishhead ought
to be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sun
speculatively. The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slithered
on the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the small
noises of the coming night began to multiply. The green-bodied flies
went away and big mosquitoes, with speckled gray legs, came to take the
places of the flies. The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with small
mouthing sounds as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable. A
monster crawfish, big as a chicken lobster, crawled out of the top of
his dried mud chimney and perched himself there, an armored sentinel on
the watchtower. Bull bats began to flitter back and forth above the tops
of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle
off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen
with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it
moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's.
Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact
little swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.

A little more time passed and Fishhead came out of the woods at the
back, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder. For a few seconds
his deformities showed in the clearing, then the black inside of the
cabin swallowed him up. By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nub
of it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows lay
inland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the great
smacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back in
the water came shoreward in a chorus.

But the two brothers in their green covert gave heed to nothing except
the one thing upon which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed.
Joel gently shoved his gun-barrels across the log, cuddling the stock to
his shoulder and slippi