knew just the moment when the morning devotions would begin--some
fifteen minutes before the breakfast hour. He knew about how long he
would be in traversing the distance between his own house and the scene
of the coming tragedy, and the morning after his resolve was made he
bolted his own breakfast in a hurry, seized his spear, and scurried
down the wood road until he approached the verge of the Maitland
clearing. Then began a series of extraordinary movements.

Mr. Maitland's house stood close by the wood at one side of the
clearing, and Grant could easily have walked unperceived until within a
few yards of the place, had he but kept hidden by the trees; but such
was not his course. Right across the clearing, and passing near the
house, had been dug a great ditch a yard in depth, a year or two
before, with the intent of draining a piece of lowland lately
subjugated. This ditch had been overgrown with weeds until it was
almost hidden from sight, and now in summer time its bottom was but a
sandy surface. It was with the aid of this natural shelter that the
wily invader proposed to steal upon his enemy. Already he was lurking
near its entrance.

Just why he had to "lurk" at this particular juncture Grant could not
probably have told. There was not the slightest necessity for lurking.
There were no windows in the side of the house toward him, and no one
was visible about the place, but he knew what he had read, and he knew
that the savages of the South Sea islands were always addicted to
lurking just previous to springing upon their unsuspecting victims, and
he was bound to lurk and do it thoroughly. His manner of lurking
consisted, before he reached the clearing fence, in crouching very low
and creeping along in a most constrained and uncomfortable manner,
occasionally dropping to the ground slowly and with utter noiselessness
and rising again with equal caution. All this time the face of the
young man wore what he conceived to be an expression of most bloody
purpose craftily concealed. Upon reaching the fence, he shot his head
above it, and withdrew it with lightning-like rapidity, frightening
almost into convulsions, in her nest, a robin whose home was between
the rails in the immediate vicinity. Of course he could have looked
through the fence with greater ease, but that would have involved no
such dramatic effect. His sudden view of the landscape taken, the boy
climbed the fence, ran to the dry ditch, p