A FANCY SHOT

The things that had attracted Tom’s attention were so trifling in themselves that only a person alertly observing would have noticed them at all. Yet Tom thought they might have significance, and he was bent upon finding out what that significance was.

First of all, he had observed that a little blind trail seemed to lead westward from the tree, and in no other direction, as if it had been made by someone who visited the tree and then returned by the way he had come, going no farther in any direction. The trail was so blind that Tom could not be sure it was a trail at all. If so, it had been traversed very infrequently, and at rather long intervals. If it had been the only suggestive thing seen, the boy would probably not have given it a thought. But he observed also that the bark of the gum tree was a trifle scarred at two points, suggesting that some one with heavy boots on had recently climbed it.

As soon as the other boys had gone back to camp, Tom set to work to make a closer inspection of his surroundings. He climbed the tree to the crotch and looked about him. There was nothing there, but from that height he could trace the little trail through the bushes for perhaps fifty or a hundred yards. He satisfied himself in that way that it was really a trail, made by the passage of some living thing, man or beast, through the dense undergrowth.

“I’ll follow that trail after a while,” he resolved, “but I’ll say nothing about it now. I might be laughed at for my pains. Not that I mind that, of course. We fellows are well used to being laughed at among ourselves. But when I say anything about this, I want to have something to tell that is worth telling. After all, it may be only the path of a deer or of one of the queer little wild horses—tackeys, they call them—that live in the swamps. Or a wild hog may have made it. I don’t know, and I’m not going to talk about the thing till I can talk to some purpose.”

As he wriggled around in the crotch, he dropped his knife from his pocket.

“That’s a reminder,” he reflected, “that people sometimes drop things when they don’t intend to. If anybody else has been roosting up here he may have dropped things, too. I’ll recover my knife and then I’ll search around the tree.”

He was on the ground now, and having replaced his knife he began a minute search of the space for ten or twenty feet around the tree. It was thickly carpeted with the densely-growing vegetation that is always quick to take possession of every unoccupied inch of ground in the far southern swamps and woodlands. Searching such a space for small objects was almost a hopeless task, and finding nothing, Tom was on the point of giving up the attempt, when he trod upon something. Examining it, he found it to be an old corncob pipe with a short cane stem. It was blackened by long smoking, and that side of it which had lain next to the ground had begun to decay. But there was half-burned tobacco in it still.

From all these facts Tom thought it likely that the pipe, while still alight, had been dropped from the tree, and that its owner had failed to find it upon his descent.

“That means that somebody was using this tree for a lookout a good while ago. I can’t imagine why or wherefore, but I mean to find out if I can. Just now I hear Larry’s whistle calling me to dinner. I wonder how he manages to make that shrill shrieking noise by putting two fingers into his mouth and blowing between them. I must get him to teach me the trick.”

It was decided at dinner that the deer hunt should occur as soon as that meal was finished.

“The deer will be lying down, chewing the cud, at this time of day,” explained Larry to his two guests, who had never shared a deer hunt, “and so we shan’t disturb him in placing ourselves. What’s the nature of the ground, Cal? Can three of us cover it while the fourth drives?”

“We must,” Cal answered. “It may give some one of us a very long shot, but with nitro-powder cartridges these modern guns of ours will pitch buckshot a long way. The marsh in which the deer is feeding is on a sort of peninsula which is surrounded by water except on one side. That land side is a rather narrow neck, narrow enough for three guns to cover it, I think, if the guns are well handled. Fortunately the marsh itself is small. If it weren’t we might drive all day, as we have no dogs, without routing the deer out. As it is, I think I can start him, and I’ll do the driving after I post you three at the three best points of observation.”

“How do you ‘drive,’ as you call it, Cal?” Dick asked.

“Well, if we had dogs and horses, as we always do in a regular deer hunt, the man appointed to drive would ride around to the farther side of the swamp, and put the dogs into it. The dogs would scatter out into an irregular line and zigzag to one side and the other in search of the quarry. In that way they would advance till they found the deer and set him running toward the line of men on the posts. Every one of these would be intently looking and listening till the deer should come running at top speed in an effort to dash past his enemies and escape. The man on the post nearest where he breaks through is expected to bring him down with a quick shot aimed at his side, just behind the shoulder.”

“But what if he misses?”

“In that case the deer has won the game. As we have no dogs and there are only four of us, I mean to post you three at the points I find best suited, and then I’ll play hounds myself. I’ll go round to the farther side of the little swamp, invade it as noisily as I can, whooping and hallooing in the hope of getting the deer up. If I do, he’ll make a dash to get out of the swamp, and if no one of you manages to shoot him in the act, we’ll have none of that juicy venison that you, Tom, thought you had almost in your mouth when I first told you that the deer was here. Now let us be off. We’re burning daylight. Load with buckshot cartridges.”

When the neck of the little peninsula was reached, Cal bade his comrades wait at the point from which their camp could be seen, while he should go over the ground and pick out the places to be occupied as posts.

On his return he placed the others each at the point he had chosen for him, taking care that Tom and Dick should have the places near which the quarry was most likely to make his effort to break through.

“Now, you must keep perfectly still,” he admonished the two inexperienced ones, “and keep both eyes and three ears, if you have so many, wide open. You may see the deer without hearing him, or you may hear him tearing through the bushes before you see him. That will give you notice of his coming, but don’t let him fool you. He may not come straight on from the spot at which you hear him. If he catches sight, sound or smell of you, he’ll veer off in some other direction. So if you hear him coming don’t move a muscle except those of your eyes.

“Now I’m off to drive. If I can, I’ll get him up and away. After that everything will depend upon you.”

It was nearly half an hour before the boys heard Cal’s shoutings in the distance, but slowly coming nearer. After that, in the eager watching and waiting, the seconds seemed minutes, and the minutes dragged themselves out into what seemed hours.

At last, however, Dick heard the deer breaking through bushes just ahead of him. In another second the frightened creature burst into view and Dick fired, missing the game, which instantly changed its course and ran away toward its left, with the speed of the wind. Dick, in his excited disappointment, fired his second barrel at a hopelessly long range.

Almost immediately he heard a shot from Tom’s gun, and after that all was still. Cal struggled out of the swamp, while Larry and Dick made their way toward Tom’s post, “to hear,” Cal said, “just what excuses the novices have invented on the spur of the moment by way of accounting for their bad marksmanship.”

“I have none to offer,” said Dick, manfully. “I missed my shot, that’s all.”

“How is it with you, Tom? What plea have you to offer?”

“None whatever,” answered Tom. “Yonder lies the deer by the side of the fallen tree. He was taking a flying leap over it when I shot him—on the wing, as it were.”

The congratulations that followed this complete surprise may be imagined. Cal fairly “wreaked himself upon expression” in sounding his praises of Tom’s superb marksmanship, and better still, his coolness and calmness under circumstances, as Cal phrased it, “that might have disturbed the equipoise of an Egyptian mummy’s nerve centres.”

Tom took all this congratulation and extravagance of praise modestly and with as little show of emotion as he had manifested while making his difficult shot.

Perhaps this was even more to his credit than the other. For this was the first time Tom Garnett had ever seen a deer hunt, or a live deer, either, for that matter.