Then it came the turn of the real things. Marche and Molly, a struggling bird tucked under each arm, waded out along the lanes of stools, feeling about under the icy water until their fingers encountered the wire-cored cords. Then, to the leg rings of each madly flapping duck and swan and goose they snapped on the leads, and the tethered birds, released, beat the water into foam and flapped and splashed and tugged, until, finally reconciled, they began to souse themselves with [Pg 56]great content, and either mounted their stools or swam calmly about as far as their tethers permitted. [Pg 56] Marche, struggling knee-deep in the water, his arms full of wildly flapping gander, hailed Molly for instructions. "That's a mated bird!" she called out to him. "Peg him outside by himself!" So Marche pegged out the furious old gander, whose name was Uncle Dudley, and in a few minutes that dignified and insulted bird, missing his spouse, began to talk about it. Every wifely feeling outraged, his spouse replied loudly from the extreme end of the inner lane, telling her husband, and every duck, goose, and swan [Pg 57]in the vicinity, what she thought of such an inhuman separation. [Pg 57] Molly laughed, and so did Marche. Duck after duck, goose after goose, joined indignantly in the conversation. The mallard drakes twisted their emerald-green heads and began that low, half gurgling, half quacking conversation in which their mottled brown and gray mates joined with louder quacks. The geese conversed freely; but the long-necked swans held their peace, occupied with the problem of picking to pieces the snaps on their anklets. "Now," said Molly breathlessly, as the last madly protesting bird had been stooled, "let's get into the blind as soon as we can, Mr. Marche. There may be [Pg 58]ducks in Currituck still, and every minute counts now." [Pg 58] So Marche towed the dory around to the westward and drew it into a channel where it might lie concealed under the reeds. When he came across to the blind he found Molly there, seated on the plank in the cemented pit behind the screen of reeds and rushes, laying out for him his cartridges. There they were, in neat rows on the rail, fives, sixes, and a few of
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