A broad sweep of lawn, broken only by flagstone walks and trees, extended from the creek's edge to the house. The trees were ancient dogwoods, with a single huge willow for extra shade. There was a small pier extending into the creek, and from the rotted pilings next to it, Rick saw that the original pier had been much larger. A white barn stood at a short distance from the house. A barn of that size, Rick thought, meant a pretty substantial farm. He searched for signs of life and saw none. There was a boat, he noticed, an outboard skiff perhaps fifteen feet long, pulled up on the bank under an oak tree at the edge where the lawn met uncut field. A lawn table and chairs under the big willow looked inviting, and he speculated that Merlin and friends must spend considerable time there. Some of the chairs were of the padded variety, covered with plastic wet from the morning dew. Scotty pointed to the roof of the mansion. "Must be a ham radio operator there. Look at that hay rake." Both Rick and Steve had the same thoughts as they stared at the tall antenna, with its cluster of small rods joining a single main bar at right angles on top of the pole. The antenna might be needed for fringe-area television--or, on the other hand, it might be a communications antenna, as Scotty had said. "Looks interesting," Steve said. The creek flowed only a little distance past the mansion before it became so narrow that Orvil Harris had to turn for the trip downstream. As the crab boat came abreast of the mansion again, Rick looked to the other side of the creek and saw the duck blind. It wasn't exactly opposite the house, being designed so that gunners in the blind would shoot diagonally across the creek and downstream, rather than near the house itself. The blind was on stilts, made of board, with a big "picture window" without glass through which duck hunters could fire freely. It was designed for entry by boat, and there was a line of poles sticking up from the water that marked the boat's docking place. In season, the entire blind including the poles would be covered with a screen of fresh foliage, so that hunters, blind, and boat would seem like a natural object to any duck that flew by. Rick saw that the entrance, at the point where the boat would nose in, was downstream from the mansion, at the back corner of the blind. Anyone approaching from the swamp behind the blind could enter unseen from Calvert's Favor. Not until they were back at the cove did any of them speak. "That antenna was odd," Steve said. "Did you ever see anything like it, Rick?" "Not exactly," Rick admitted. "It could be for TV, although it's an unusual design, or it could be some kind of ham rig, as Scotty said." "Or it could be something else," Steve concluded. "No sign of a flyin'-saucer launcher," Orvil Harris said. He was stoking his battered brier. Rick grinned. "I wouldn't know one if I saw it."