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Updated: June 7, 2025
THE DEVIL'S DECOYS. Some may be ready to affirm that physical and moral penalties do not appear to overtake all men; that many men known to be given to intemperance and sensuality are strong, well, and live to a good age. Let us not make any mistake concerning these; they are exceptions to the rule; the appearance of health in them is but the grossness of sensuality.
The nine black decoys picketed before us straining at their cords, gossiping, dozing for a moment, preening their wings or rising up for a vigorous stretch, appeared by some curious optical illusion four times their natural size; now they seemed to be black dogs, again a group of sombre, misshapen gnomes.
"She was with me in Genoa." "Yes. We have met. A very clever little person. Il Passero thinks very highly of her. She has been educated in the higher schools, and is perhaps one of our cleverest decoys." Hugh Henfrey paused. "Now look here, Monsieur Vervoort," he exclaimed at last, "I'm very much in the dark about all this curious business. Lisette knows a lot concerning Mademoiselle Yvonne."
Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of the neighbourhood red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts.
The people, young and old, are universally kind and respectful to those strangers who sojourn among them, meeting them in a spirit of frankness and exacting the same. We shoot whenever the weather is suitable, and amuse ourselves at other times in various ways repairing boats, rigging decoys, cleaning guns, loading shell, and making ready for a good day when it does come.
Regnie reported forty wooden decoys, twelve of sheet iron, eight of cork and canvas, and twelve wooden duck decoys. Besides these, there were still untouched a dozen bunches of fir and spruce twigs, like those used in covering the floor of the ice-hut.
Evidently, they were beginning to feel that the year was growing old. Greens were sobering into browns, and near the water's edge were tips of silvery white. The frowsy-looking grassy bunches, here and there, were ducking blinds, where hunters soon would be in hiding with their wooden decoys floating near.
Cadaverous, selfish old women; others, handsome, gay, and reckless, evidently in the interest of the table, and hired to act as decoys; others, again, young and inexperienced; and even ladies, pale, unhappy-looking, were all represented.
In the miniature wavelets possible under the lea, the decoys bobbed gravely, swinging to their anchor strings. The sun flashed from their backs, and from the little waves. All about were the tall stalks of reeds; and ahead, where the open water was, grew tufts of grasses that looked silvery-brown and somehow intimate when, as now, Bobby looked at them from their own plane of elevation.
All the arts learned in the prisons and purlieus of New York were put into exercise. Decoys, "bunko-steerers" at home, would be on the look-out for promising subjects as each crowd of fresh prisoners entered the gate, and by kindly offers to find them a sleeping place, lure them to where they could be easily despoiled during the night.
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