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 kill the great gator that was known as the king of the river and whose cunning had become famous in that region of the Low Country; and he would nail to his dining-room wall, bristling with more than fifty sets of antlers taken by him and his three sons, the massive, strangely palmated antlers of the big whitetail buck that had taken up his abode that spring in a laurel bottom near the southern end of the swamp.

These were undertakings which would test Mayfield's skill, but would surely add to his fame as a hunter and woodsman—the only sort of fame for which the old swamp ranger gave a snap of his horny fingers. For Sandy Jim, supremely confident of his own woodcraft, never doubted his success. Before the first frost of October the great armored hide of the river king would be drying in Mayfield's yard; and even sooner than that—for he preferred deer hunting to gator hunting—the splendid antlers of the flat-horned buck of Laurel Bay would be hoisted to the place of honor above the fireplace of the big room where Sandy Jim and his sons dined and smoked and talked, sometimes about crops, but more often about deer and dogs.

Mayfield lost no time in carrying out his plans. During the long Low Country summer the old woodsman was always lazy and indifferent; but invariably, as autumn drew near, his interest in life