ed. "I got a hunch that
Yankee Bar's a good bet for us for a little while. We dassn't look into
Memphis, 'count of last trip down. Mendova's all right, but wait'll
we've hunted Yankee Bar."

The money burned in their pockets, but as they stood looking out at the
long, beautiful Yankee Bar its appeal went home. For more than a hundred
years generations of pirates had used there, and no one knows how many
tragedies have left their stain in the great band around from Gold Dust
Landing to Chickasaw Bluffs No. 1.

After dark they rowed over to the point and put out their decoys, dug
their pits, screened them, and brushed over their tracks in the sand.
Then they played cards till midnight, turned in for a little sleep, and
turned out again in the black morning to go to their places with
repeating shotguns and cripple-killer rifles in their hands.

When they were in their places, and the river silence prevailed, they
saw the stars overhead, the reflections on sand and water around them,
and the quivering change as air currents moved in the dark--the things
that walk in the night. They heard, at intervals, many voices. Some they
knew as the fluent music of migrant geese flying over on long laps of
their fall flight, but some they did not know, except that they were
river voices.

Ducks flew by no higher than the tops of the willow trees up the bar,
their wings whistling and their voices eager in the dark. The lurkers
saw these birds darting by like black streaks, tempting vain shots, but
they were old hunters, and knew they wanted at least a little light.
Over on the mainland they heard the noises of wilderness animals, and
away off yonder a mule's "he-haw" reverberated through the bottoms and
over bars and river.

For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world
endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they
thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of
thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional
visits to town for another kind of thrill, another sort of excitement.
But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid
temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as
to what they liked, what they didn't like, what the world would do for
them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated,
without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance
from the world,