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 lagoon of the egrets some ten miles or more away, the little old man who lived in the white vine-covered cottage by the shore of the bay, was sitting on an oak stump beside that lagoon, feasting his eyes on the beauty of the tall milk-white birds perching in scores and hundreds in the young feathery-foliaged cypresses fringing the egret lake. And at that same moment Red Cam, his shotgun balanced in his tight hand, his black mongrel Brutus following at his heels, was making his way through the mixed forest of pine, oak and hickory in the midst of which lay the secluded serpentine backwater where the plumed white birds had their town.

A definite purpose had brought Cam to those woods. An inveterate hunter, he spent most of his time roaming with his gun. Laws and seasons were nothing to him. At all seasons he killed whatever game crossed his path. On this June day he was hopeful that Lady Luck would show him a wild turkey and he was working down through the woods towards the lagoon because a few days before he had seen the sign of a big gobbler in a certain swale near the water's edge. But John Marston had come to the lagoon by mere accident—or so he would have said if he had been asked about it, though it is possible that the woods genie, preparing the drama to be enacted there that day, was responsible for the chance which had turned him aside from his path.