under the battered brown felt hat no longer sagged forward sleepily. But if Mayfield's drowsiness had disappeared, there was no hint of restlessness or impatience in his attitude. As the afternoon waned the prospect of a turkey would grow less, but the prospect of a deer would improve. Most of the turkey hens were now setting, and the gobblers would seek their roosts well before sunset. But in spring, when the law forbade deer hunting, the whitetail bucks and does soon learned that they need not wait till nightfall to begin feeding. As the shadows lengthened, old Sandy Jim would watch the swamp-edge in front of him with growing expectancy in the hope that out of the fringe of short, dense canes a buck or a doe would come to face his gun—a gun to which the law meant nothing.
Of the three pairs of hostile eyes watching the dun figure of the hunter, two seemed as insensible as Mayfield himself to the passage of time. The eyes in the myrtle thicket had, perhaps, lost something of their intensity, but they never wavered in their fixed, inscrutable stare. The eyes behind the black oak trunk—those eyes which had the hardness and the eternal quality of stone—still glittered with that grim confidence, that ominous assurance of triumph which had shone in them from the beginning. But the eyes in the clump of broom grass
