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o settle down upon us, thrillingly lonely, and full of strange, desolate cries of night creatures from the mangrove swamps that surrounded our little oasis for miles. Not even when Tom and I had been alone on "Dead Men's Shoes" had I felt so utterly out of and beyond the world. Charlie smacked his big smiling lips at the savage solitude of it. "It's great to get away from everything--like this--isn't it?" he remarked, looking round with huge satisfaction into the homeless haunted wild, with its brooding blackness as of primeval chaos. Sailor lay at our feet, dreaming of to-morrow's duck. His master's thoughts were evidently in the same direction. "How are you with a gun?" he asked, turning to the boy. "O! I won't brag. I had better wait till to-morrow. But, of course, you will have to lend me a gun." "I have a beauty for you--just your weight," replied Charlie, his face beaming as it did only at the thought of his guns, which he kept polished like jewels and guarded as jealously as a violinist his violin, or an Arab his harem. CHAPTER VI _Duck._ Dawn was just breaking as I felt Charlie's great paw on my shoulder next morning. He was very serious. For a moment, as I sat up, still half asleep, I thought he had news of Tobias. But it was only duck. He had heard a great quacking during the night, and was impatient to make a start. So was Sailor. I was scarcely dressed when Tom arrived with breakfast, and in a few minutes we had shouldered our guns, and were crossing the half mile of peaty waste that divided us from the marl lakes from which the night wind had carried that provocative quacking. Ahead of us, the crew were carrying the skiffs on their shoulders, and very soon we were each seated in regulation fashion on a canvas chair in front of our respective skiffs, with our guns across our knees, and a negro behind us to do the poling. Charlie went ahead, with Sailor standing in the bow quivering with excitement. The necessity of absolute silence, of course, had been impressed upon us all by the most severe of all sportsmen. But the admonition was scarcely necessary, for, as the sun rose, the scene that spread before us was beautiful enough to have hushed the most garrulous tongue. Far and near stretched misty levels of milkwhite water, in which the mangrove trees made countless islands, sometimes of considerable extent, impenetrable coppices often thirty or forty feet high. From horizon t
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