Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/253

 accessibility of the spot caused him to forget it; and now, as he turned the matter over in his mind, suspicion ripened to conviction.

He rode a quarter of a mile out of his way to a little knoll where a stunted live oak looked out over the wide wastes of river marsh. With almost simian litheness, in spite of his seventy years, he swung his light body from the saddle to the first of the live oak's limbs and climbed thirty feet up into the tree. For two minutes he gazed across the green expanse at a sunny spot on the slope of the causeway where the loop of a creek came in to the bank. When he dropped from the oak limb and reached for the shotgun which he had leaned against the tree trunk, his thin keen face looked more than ever like that of a hunting hawk.

A half hour later, the king of the river, stretched at full length close to the water's edge, woke suddenly. Perhaps he had felt the ground quiver slightly under him. The flat-horned buck had made no sound as he rose hurriedly from his bed in the tall reeds on the high level top of the causeway; but possibly the impact of his feet on the hard earth had sent an almost imperceptible tremor along the bank and down the muddy slope. Yet, of the three gators dozing there in the security of the safest basking place within many miles, only the river king awoke.