ep them myself. They eat outrageously, those nine deceivers.
They are well placed to-day; just the right distance." And he called the
three nearest us by name, for they were quacking loudly. "Be still,
Fannine! There, Pierrot! If your cord and swivel does not work, my good
drake, I'll fix it for you, but don't make such a fuss; you'll have
noise enough to make later." And gripping me by the arm, he pushed me
firmly ahead of him to a small open door in the mound. I peered into the
darkness within.

"Get in," said he. "It's small, but it's warm and comfortable inside.
After you, my friend," he added graciously, and we descended into a
narrow ditch, its end blocked by a small, safe-like door leading into a
subterranean hut, its roof being the mound, shelving out to a
semicircular, overhanging eyebrow skirting the edge of the circular pool
some ten yards back of the line of live decoys.

"Ah!" exclaimed Monsieur le Cure, "you should have seen the duck-blind I
had three years ago. This _gabion_ of mine is smaller, but it is in
better line with the flights," he explained as he opened the door. "Look
out for the steps--there are two."

I now stood shivering in the gloom of a box-like, underground anteroom,
provided with a grated floor and a low ribbed ceiling; beyond this,
through another small door, was an adjoining compartment deeper than the
one in which we stood, and in the darkness I caught the outline of a
cot-bed, a carved, high-backed, leather-seated chair, and the blue glint
of guns lying in their racks. The place was warm and smelled, like the
cabin of some fishing-sloop, of sea-salt and tar.

It did not take me long to get out of my clothes. When the last of them
lay around my heels I received a rubbing down with a coarse sailor's
shirt, that sent the blood back where it belonged.

"_Allons!_ Into bed at once!" insisted the cure. "You'll find those army
blankets dry."

I felt my way in while he struck a match and lighted a candle upon a
narrow shelf strewn with empty cartridges. The candle sputtered, sunk to
a blue flame, and flared up cheerfully, while the cure poured me out a
stiff glass of brandy, and I lay warm in the blankets of the _Armee
Francaise_, and gazed about me at my strange quarters.

Back of my pillow was, tightly closed, in three sections, a narrow
firing-slit. Beside the bed the candle's glow played over the carved
back of the leather-seated chair. Above the closed slit ran a shelf, and
ran