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 behind a certain big pine log where once upon a time a strange thing had happened.

The boy's thoughts returned to that event of nearly three years before. Guests were expected at the plantation. His mother's ideas of hospitality required a wild turkey for the occasion, and he went out to try to get one. Before dawn he took his station behind the big pine log at a point where a low evergreen bush afforded additional concealment. At day-clean, as the Low Country woodsmen term the full dawn, he began calling. With his lips pressed against the bowl of an old brier pipe he could make sounds which only the wiliest of the long-bearded old gobblers could recognize as counterfeit. He called three or four times, waited a few minutes, then called again. It was just the hour when the turkeys should be coming down from the tall trees deep in the swamps to feed, and the boy listened eagerly for an answer to his summons.

Presently he heard a faint sound which, however, was certainly not made by a turkey. It came, he thought, from the reeds fringing the little canebrake at the edge of the glade, and he concluded that it was probably only a marsh rabbit. Sitting on the ground behind the log, his gun within easy reach of his right hand, he continued calling at intervals, using all his art, trying all the tricks of tone and of timbre which experience had taught him.