e popping continuously. Everybody was
shooting and laughing and running about. The game was to pelt away,
retrieve your bird as quickly as you could, and pelt away again. The
dogs, working up to their points carefully and stylishly, as good dogs
should, were being constantly left in the rear. They drew down to their
points--and behold nobody but their devoted master would pay any
attention to their bird! Everybody else was engaged busily in popping
away at any one of the dozen-odd other birds to be had for the
selection!

Poor Dodge, being somewhat biased by the accident of ownership, looked
on us as a lot of barbarians--as, for the time being, we were; nice,
happy barbarians having a good time. He worked his dogs conscientiously,
and muttered in his beard. The climax came when, in the joyous
excitement of the occasion, someone threw out a chance remark on "those
---- dogs" being in the way. Then Dodge withdrew with dignity. Having a
fellow-feeling as a dog-handler I went over to console him. He was
inconsolable; and so remained until after lunch.

In this manner we made our way slowly down the length of the slough, and
then slowly back again. Of the birds originally flushed from the
Egyptian corn into the thicket but a small proportion had left that
thicket for the open country of the tumbleweed and sage; and of the
latter we had been able to shoot at a very, very small percentage.
Nevertheless, when we emptied our pockets, we found that each had made
his bag. We counted them out, throwing them into one pile.

"Twenty-four," counted the Captain.

"Twenty-four," Tom enumerated.

"Twenty-four," Uncle Jim followed him.

We each had twenty-four. And then it developed that every man had saved
just one bird of his limit until after lunch. No one wanted to be left
out of _all_ the shooting while the rest filled their bags; and no one
had believed that anybody but himself had come so close to the limit.

So we laughed, and shouldered our guns, and trudged across country to
the clump of cottonwood where already the girls had spread lunch.

That was a good lunch. We sat under shady trees, and the sunlit plains
stretched away and away to distant calm mountains. Near at hand the
sparse gray sagebrush reared its bonneted heads; far away it blurred
into a monochrome where the plains lifted and flowed molten into the
canons and crevices of the foothills. Numberless crows, blackbirds, and
wildfowl crossed and recrossed the ve