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 drowsy yet alert, indifferent yet eager, listening and watching silently, never suspecting that he himself was watched.

Of the two pairs of unseen eyes that were fixed upon him, one pair, gazing out from the edge of a small myrtle thicket between the hunter and the fringe of short canes along the swamp's margin, never strayed from the motionless dull-brown shape which had taken its station on the pine stump. To the owner of those eyes that dun figure had become, from the moment of its appearance on the scene, the most important and the most hated thing in the visible world.

Until that figure had appeared, the watchful eyes in the myrtle thicket had seen and taken note of many things—towhee buntings and brown thrashers scratching amid the fallen leaves, a gray squirrel moving about the branches of a sweet gum, a big red-crested logcock hammering on a dead pine sapling a little way up the slope. But now all these were forgotten. The eyes in the myrtle thicket no longer saw them. They saw only the form of the hunter, motionless, silent, as inconspicuous in its brown corduroys as the stump itself; and they saw him with fear and hatred, with hatred which was perhaps even more potent than their fear. If the eyes in the myrtle thicket had possessed the dread power which the ancients attributed to that