he could drop upon it from the air before it flopped back into the water, he would have his dinner.
A little distance downstream, around a bend of the creek, another hunter was watching and waiting. Deaf Jen Murray, famous among the negro marshmen of the Low Country for the length of his lean arms, which enabled him to cast his line twenty feet farther into the surf than the most powerful of his rivals, crouched in his little flat-bottomed punt watching the eagle with avid, crafty eyes. Jen had fished the flood tide that morning at a shell bank just below the creek bend and had made a good catch of whiting and croaker. An hour before high water, when the fish had stopped biting, he had pushed his punt into the entrance of a little gully opening into the creek. Then, bending the tall marsh grass over him to shut out the glare—and also to hide the boat from view in case a squadron of black ducks settled on the creek—he had lain down in the punt for a nap.
He had slept longer than he intended. When he was awakened by a sudden movement of the punt as it slid a foot or so on the soft mud of the gully now left nearly dry by the receding tide, the first thing that he saw through the screen of marsh blades bending above him was the eagle hovering in the air —two or three hundred yards away. Slowly and very cautiously he drew his wiry body to a sitting posture
