when his failure to cock that gun would be regretted bitterly.
Before that moment came, however, there were developments in the drama of which old Sandy Jim, unknown to himself, had become the center—this silent drama of the unseen eyes.
The first of these developments had no apparent starting point, no visible or audible cause. To Sandy Jim's ears no sound had come except the ordinary sounds of the woods—the songs and call notes of small birds, the screaming of a soaring red-shouldered hawk, the cat-like complaining cries of a red-bellied woodpecker somewhere in the swamp. Hence it was not sound which had warned him, if indeed he had received any specific warning. Nor could it have been sight; for while the myrtle thicket and the broom grass clump were in front of him and in plain view, the black oak trunk was directly behind him up the slope and he had never once glanced in that direction.
Nevertheless, the thing which he now did was not purposeless, not accidental. For just before he did it, a change had come over his face, a change so slight as to be scarcely noticeable, yet definite and undoubtedly significant.
Gradually the thin nostrils above the sparse white mustache had contracted and tightened in that odd way which they had in moments of stress,
