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 and take its seat on a certain low pine stump fifty yards from the swamp's margin.

Sandy Jim Mayfield believed in luck. Above all, he believed in the luck of lucky places. Sitting on this stump, he had killed the greatest gobbler that had ever fallen to his gun. Sitting on this stump, he had shot down not his biggest buck but the buck whose antlers were the finest of the sixty pairs of deer horns bristling on the walls of his cabin. Spring hunting—and it was now mid-April—called for as little expenditure of energy as possible. Sandy Jim, lazy with the languor of spring, had left his dogs at home and had walked across a mile of lonely pineland straight to the old pine stump near the swamp's edge.

There the old woodsman would sit till dusk, if necessary, his loaded double-barreled gun resting across his knees, his white head dropped forward a little between his square, high shoulders. If a deer or a turkey came to him there, its doom would be sealed. Being a believer in luck and more particularly in the luck of this spot, and knowing deer and turkeys as he did, Sandy Jim thought it more than likely that some time during the long afternoon a deer or a turkey would come.

He waited, therefore, patiently and hopefully, basking in the warm April sunshine, hearing and yet not hearing the songs of the nesting birds,