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 follow close at heel, slunk away amid the tree trunks.

Red Cam moved swiftly with lynx-like litheness. The liquor which heated his brain and loosened his tongue while he rested under the sycamore seemed not to impair in the slightest his accustomed skill in all the arts of the woods. He knew well the wariness of the old ibis and he knew that his only chance of getting within range lay in crawling almost to the end of a low, narrow, reed-grown tongue of land, lined with willows and studded with upstanding cypress knees, extending well out into the lagoon. This would be no easy task, yet Cam felt that his luck had turned. Weeks or months might pass before he had another opportunity as good as this one to carry out the threat which was to be part of his revenge on the man he hated.

Sanute stood on his cypress limb, languid, motionless, seemingly asleep. His long neck was drawn in between his hunched shoulders, his heavy bill rested on his chest. He looked a picture of lazy, drowsy contentment. Often his eyes remained closed for minutes at a time; yet, though he seemed to doze, he was aware, by sight or sound, of nearly every unusual incident in the life of the lagoon around him.

Sometimes circling egrets passed so near him as almost to touch him with their snowy wings. A