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"The fellow turned pale," said the surveyor, as he resumed his seat in the smoking-car and the landscape began again to whirl by. The pot-hunter stood for a moment, and then slowly, as if he stole away from some sleeping enemy, left the place. Alarm went with him like an attendant ghost.
"My dear fellow," I interrupted, "what's all this about? Why jealousy?" "You know what a pot-hunter is in athletics? A chap that is simply out for prizes? Well, that's what a lot of them think of me. That I'm just out to get orders and medals and distinctions and so forth." "That's nonsense," said I. "I happen to know. Your reputation in the brigade is unassailable."
And so Uncle Ike's grandson loafed and pottered about in the fields with his ax and his hound dogs, not doing so much harm to the quail but acquiring knowledge of the habits of the birds and skill as a still-hunting pot-hunter that would serve him well later on.
What suffering it costs to be a coward! Some days before the crevasse occurred, he whom we know as the pot-hunter stood again on the platform of that same little railway station whence we once saw him vanish at sight of Bonaventure Deschamps. He had never ventured there since, until now. But there was a new station agent. His Indian squaw was dead.
His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances that would soon be hidden in the abrupt fall of the southern night. The pot-hunter knew him. Not by name, but by face. The day the outlaw saw Bonaventure at the little railway station this man was with him. The name the pot-hunter did not know was St. Pierre.
He was discharged, and became, later on, assistant editor of a new weekly paper that was started. He dined with Jane and Katherine at their flat, soon after he could get about. He was leaner than ever, white and gaunt, and often ill-tempered from pain. Johnny was there too, a major on leave, stuck over with coloured ribbons. Jane called him a pot-hunter.
At last, goaded into a moment of forgetfulness by the urge of his desire, he lifted up his voice in a sudden abrupt honk, honk! The pot-hunter stopped his crawling and peered delightedly through the sedgy stems. Here was a prize ready to his hand. The flock was still far off, and might easily take alarm before he could get within range.
As he looked out upon the sky a soft, faint tremor of light glimmered for a moment over it, without disturbing a shadow below. The paddle stirred gently, and the canoe slowly drew back; the storm was coming to betray him with its lightnings. In the black forest's edge the pot-hunter lingered trembling. Oh for the nerve to take a brave man's chances! A little courage would have saved his life.
Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a trail hot-foot to the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with difficulty persuaded to give the right of way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no sportsman. Once at the hill, he dives for the central chamber, his sharp-clawed, splayey feet splashing up the sand like a bather in the surf.
And somewhere in this wild desolation, in this green prospect of a million deaths waiting in silence alike for harmful and harmless creatures, one man is hiding from all mankind. Of all the teeming multitudes of the human world, the pot-hunter knows not one soul who is on his side; not one whom he dare let see his face or come between him and a hiding-place. The water is rising fast.
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