So then he remarked bitterly: “I suppose ducks crow back East--or bark.” He was perfectly welcome to all the satire he could invent; I was not to be turned from my curiosity about the clamor in the water outside, and as I watched I said aloud: “There’s something behind it.” This brought him to the window, where, as he stood silent beside me, I could feel his impatience as definitely as if it had been a radiator. The matter was that he had his mind running on something and I had my mind running on something--and they weren’t the same things; and each of us wished the other to be interested in his own thing. “Something behind it,” echoed Scipio slightingly. “Behind every quack you’ll find a duck.” To this I returned no answer. “Maybe they have forgot themselves and laid eggs in the water,” suggested Scipio. “Do your Western ducks lay much in September?” I inquired, with chill. The noise in the pond, which had died down for an instant, was now set up again--loud, remonstrant, voluble; the two birds sat in the middle of the water and lifted up their heads and screamed to the sky. “That’s what they’ve done,” said Scipio; “and they can’t locate the eggs. Well, it’d make me holler too. Say,” he pleaded, “what’s the point in your point, anyhow? I want to show you about those game laws.” “Must I hear it all over again and must I say it all over again?” I responded, not taking my eye from the pond. “You’ve never heard it wunst yet, for you’ve never listened.” “I did. I didn’t begin to wander till you began repeating the whole thing for the third time. And now I’ll say, for the fourth time, it’s a close season till 1912. There they go out of the pond, single file--Duchess in the lead. The Duchess has purple in her wings; the Countess has none.” “Oh, soap fat!” said Scipio. “And they’ve gone to feed on the grain in the haystack. There’s Sir Francis waiting for them by the woodpile. He’s the drake.” “Oh, soap fat!” repeated Scipio. I followed the ducks until they had waddled out of sight. “Every now and then, during the day,” I said, “they go through that same performance: sit in the water and scream louder each minute, then come out and head for the haystack in the most orderly, quiet manner, just after having given every symptom of falling into convulsions. Now I’m going to find out what that means. And what I am wondering at,” I continued, “is why you do not suggest that they are screaming at the game laws.”