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