that a man should own something because it
flies across his garden. He might as well own the wind, or think he
could write his name on a morning cloud. Besides, if we want poor
people to respect property we must give them some property to
respect. You ought to have land of your own; and I'm going to give
you some if I can."

"Going to give me some land!" repeated Long Adam.

"I apologize for addressing you as if you were a public meeting,"
said Fisher, "but I am an entirely new kind of public man who says
the same thing in public and in private. I've said this to a hundred
huge meetings throughout the country, and I say it to you on this
queer little island in this dismal pond. I would cut up a big estate
like this into small estates for everybody, even for poachers. I
would do in England as they did in Ireland--buy the big men out, if
possible; get them out, anyhow. A man like you ought to have a
little place of his own. I don't say you could keep pheasants, but
you might keep chickens."

The man stiffened suddenly and he seemed at once to blanch and flame
at the promise as if it were a threat.

"Chickens!" he repeated, with a passion of contempt.

"Why do you object?" asked the placid candidate. "Because keeping
hens is rather a mild amusement for a poacher? What about poaching
eggs?"

"Because I am not a poacher," cried Adam, in a rending voice that
rang round the hollow shrines and urns like the echoes of his gun.
"Because the partridge lying dead over there is my partridge.
Because the land you are standing on is my land. Because my own land
was only taken from me by a crime, and a worse crime than poaching.
This has been a single estate for hundreds and hundreds of years,
and if you or any meddlesome mountebank comes here and talks of
cutting it up like a cake, if I ever hear a word more of you and
your leveling lies--"

"You seem to be a rather turbulent public," observed Horne Fisher,
"but do go on. What will happen if I try to divide this estate
decently among decent people?"

The poacher had recovered a grim composure as he replied. "There
will be no partridge to rush in between."

With that he turned his back, evidently resolved to say no more, and
walked past the temple to the extreme end of the islet, where he
stood staring into the water. Fisher followed him, but, when his
repeated questions evoked no answer, turned back toward the shore.
In doing so he took a second and closer look at the ar