feet above the ground. There he remained throughout the rest of the day, and there night found him.
Another cripple came to Half-Acre Island that evening—another victim of Jen Murray's gun. The great blue heron which Jen had shot down had fallen perhaps three-quarters of a mile from the hummock. His left wing was shattered; it dangled useless and limp. But no shot had entered the heron's body, and he had no sooner struck ground than he was on his feet, striding swiftly up the muddy bed of the small gully into which he had fallen.
All day he wandered about the marshes or rested beside the little pools and rivulets left by the tide, in dreadful pain yet rousing himself now and then—for the heron is a voracious feeder—to catch a mullet or shrimp in the teeming shallows. Toward evening, when the throbbing of his broken wing had begun to pass into a sort of numbness, he fished for a while at the mouth of a small marsh brook emptying into a larger creek not more than two hundred yards from Half-Acre Island. His appetite satisfied, he bethought himself of a roosting place for the night. Near at hand he saw the lone live oak on Half-Acre and, following the bank of the creek which led in that: direction, he soon reached the
