Accordingly, in entire faith, I descended and unloaded my three sacks of wooden decoys and my three sacks of live ducks and my gun and shells.

“I’ll drive on to another hole,” said the Captain.  “Good luck!”

“Would you mind,” I suggested, meekly, “telling me in which direction this mythical fence is situated; what kind of a fence it is; and where I carry to when I get through it?”

The Captain chuckled.

“Why,” he explained, “the fence is straight ahead of you; and it’s barbed wire; and as for where you’re headed, you’ll find the pond where we saw all those ducks last night about a hundred yards or so west.”

Where we saw all those ducks!  My blood increased its pace through my veins.  Now that I was afoot, I could begin to make out things in the starlight—­the silhouettes of bushes or brush, and even three or four posts of the fence.

The Invigorator rattled into the distance.  I got my stuff the other side of the wires, and, shouldering a sack, plodded away due west.

But now I made out the pond gleaming; and by this and by the dim grayness of the earth immediately about me knew that dawn was at last under way.  The night had not yet begun to withdraw, but its first strength was going.  Objects in the world about became, not visible, but existent.  By the time I had carried my last load the rather liberal hundred yards to the shores of the pond the eastern sky had banished its stars.

My movements had, of course, alarmed the ducks.  There were not many of them, as I could judge by the whistling of their departing wings and by the silvery furrows where they had left the water.  It is curious how strong the daylight must become before the eye can distinguish a duck in flight.  The comparative paucity of numbers, I reflected, was probably due to the fact that the ducks used this pond merely as a loafing place during the day.  Therefore I should anticipate a good flight as soon as feeding time should be over; especially as one end of the pond proved to be fairly well sheltered from the high wind.

At once I set to work to build me a blind.  This I constructed of tumbleweed and willow shoots, with a lucky sagebrush as a good basis.  I made it thick below and thin on top, so I could crouch hidden, and rise easily to shoot.  Also I made it hastily, working away with a concentration that would prove very valuable could it be brought to a useful line of work.  There can nothing equal the busyness of a man hastening to perfect his arrangements before a flight of ducks is due to start.  Every few moments I would look anxiously up to see how things were going with the morning.  The light was indubitably increasing.  That is to say, I could make out the whole width of the pond, for example, although the farther banks were still in silhouette, and the sky was almost free of stars.  Also the perpendicular plane of the mountains to the west, in some subtle manner, was beginning to break.  It was not yet daylight; but the dawn was here.