Finally, my game leg—­rheumatiz, you understand—­begun to give out.  So I flops down in the shade of a sand bank to rest, and the reverend goes poking off by himself.

I cal’late I must have fell asleep, for when I looked at my watch it was close to one o’clock, and time for us to be getting back to port.  I got up and stretched and took an observation, but further’n Clarissa’s umbrella on the skyline, I didn’t see anything stirring.  Brother James wa’n’t visible, but I jedged he was within hailing distance.  You can’t see very fur on that point, there’s too many sand hills and hummocks.

I started over toward the Greased Lightning.  I’d gone only a little ways, and was down in a gully between two big hummocks, when “Bang! bang!” goes both barrels of a shotgun, and that Todd critter busts out hollering like all possessed.

“Hooray!” he squeals, in that squeaky voice of his.  “Hooray!  I’ve got ’em!  I’ve got ’em!”

Thinks I, “What in the nation does the lunatic cal’late he’s shot?” And I left my own gun laying where ’twas and piled up over the edge of that sand bank like a cat over a fence.  And then I see a sight.

There was James, hopping up and down in the beach grass, squealing like a Guinea hen with a sore throat, and waving his gun with one wing—­arm, I mean—­and there in front of him, in the foam at the edge of the surf, was two ducks as dead as Nebuchadnezzar—­two of Lonesome Huckleberries’ best decoy ducks—­ducks he’d tamed and trained, and thought more of than anything else in this world—­ except rum, maybe—­and the rest of the flock was digging up the beach for home as if they’d been telegraped for, and squawking “Fire!” and “Murder!”

Well, my mind was in a kind of various state, as you might say, for a minute.  ’Course, I’d known about Lonesome’s owning them decoys—­ told Todd about ’em, too—­but I hadn’t seen ’em nowhere alongshore, and I sort of cal’lated they was locked up in Lonesome’s hen house, that being his usual way when he went to town.  I s’pose likely they’d been feeding among the beach grass somewheres out of sight, but I don’t know for sartin to this day.  And I didn’t stop to reason it out then, neither.  As Scriptur’ or George Washin’ton or somebody says, “’twas a condition, not a theory,” I was afoul of.

“I’ve got ’em!” hollers Todd, grinning till I thought he’d swaller his own ears.  “I shot ’em all myself!”

“You everlasting—­” I begun, but I didn’t get any further.  There was a rattling noise behind me, and I turned, to see Lonesome Huckleberries himself, setting on the seat of his old truck wagon and glaring over the hammer head of that balky mare of his straight at brother Todd and the dead decoys.

For a minute there was a kind of tableau, like them they have at church fairs—­all four of us, including the mare, keeping still, like we was frozen.  But ’twas only for a minute.  Then it turned into the liveliest moving picture that ever I see.  Lonesome couldn’t swear—­being a dummy—­but if ever a man got profane with his eyes, he did right then.  Next thing I knew he tossed both hands into the air, clawed two handfuls out of the atmosphere, reached down into the cart, grabbed a pitch-fork and piled out of that wagon and after Todd.  There was murder coming and I could see it.