fat ducks were kicking beyond our
deceivers.

"Take him!" he cried, as a straggler--a drake--shot past us. I snapped
in a shell and missed, but the cure was surer. Down came the straggler,
a dead duck at sixty yards.

"Bravo, Monsieur le Cure!" I cried.

But he only smiled modestly and, extracting the empty shell, blew the
lurking smoke free from the barrels. It was noon when we turned to half
the chicken and a bottle of _vin ordinaire_ with an appetite.

The northeast wind had now shifted to the south; the bay became like
glass, and so the afternoon passed until the blood-red sun, like some
huge ribbed lantern of the Japanese, slowly sank into the sea. It grew
dusk over the desolate marsh. Stray flights of plovers, now that the
tide was again on its ebb, began to choose their resting places for the
night.

"I'm going out to take a look," said the cure. Again, like some gopher
of the prairie, he rose up out of his burrow.

Presently he returned, the old enthusiastic gleam in his eyes.

"The wind's changing," he announced. "It will be in the north again
to-night; we shall have a full moon and better luck, I hope. Do you
know," he went on excitedly, "that one night last October I killed
forty-two ducks alone in this old _gabion_. _Forty-two!_ Twenty mallards
and the rest Vignon--and not a shot before one o'clock in the morning.
Then they came in, right and left. I believe my faithful decoys will
remember that night until their dying day. Ah, it was glorious!
Glorious!" His tanned, weather-beaten features wrinkled with delight; he
had the skin of a sailor, and I wondered how often the marsh had hid
him. "Ah, my friend," he said, with a sigh, as we sat down to the
remainder of the chicken and _vin ordinaire_ for supper, this time
including the cheese, "it is not easy for a cure to shoot. My good
children of the village do not mind, but----" He hesitated, running his
long, vibrant fingers through his hair.

"What then? Tell me," I ventured. "It will go no further, I promise
you."

"Rome!" he whispered. "I have already received a letter, a gentle
warning from the palace; but I have a good friend in Cardinal Z. He
understands."

During the whole of that cold moonlight we took turns of two hours each;
one sleeping while the other watched in the chair drawn up close to the
firing-slit.

What a night!

The marsh seen through the firing-slit, with its overhanging eyebrow of
sod, seemed not of this earth. The nine