Some vague stir--the wind perhaps, or perhaps a light-footed dryad--flitted past and was gone. The surface of the "lick" rippled with her footprints, and was smooth again. All the encompassing masses of trees and undergrowth about the place were densely black and opaque, giving the sense of absolute solidity and weight, except upon the verges, which were somehow shaded off into a cloudy brown against the translucent dove-tinted tissues in which the night seemed enveloped and obscured save for the white gleaming of the stars. This was the clear color that the brackish water wore as it reflected the night. It reflected suddenly a face--a face with a long velvety muzzle, a pair of spreading antlers, and dark eyes, gentle, timorous, liquidly bright. The water stirred with a sibilant lapping sound as the buck's tongue licked at the margin. Once he held up his head to listen, with his hoof lifted, then he bent again to the ripples. There was slight relation between him, the native of these woods, and that wayward waif of the skies; but among the unnumbered influences and incidents of its course it served to save that humble sylvan life for a space. The hunter neither saw nor heard. It was only when the deer with a sudden snort and a precipitate bound fled crashing through the laurel that Walter Hoxon became aware of his presence, and of the stealthy approach that had alarmed him. The approach was stealthy no longer. A quick, nervous tread, a rustling of the boughs, and as the hunter rose to his feet his elder brother emerged from the undergrowth, taller than he as they stood together on the margin of the lick, more active, sinewy, alert. "Whyn't ye take a shot at him, Wat?" cried Justus Hoxon tumultuously. "I'll be bound ye war nappin'," he added in keen rebuke. A pause, then Walter Hoxon pulled himself together and retorted:-- "Nappin'!" in scornful falsetto. "How _could_ I get a shot, with ye a-trompin' up ez n'isy ez a herd o' cattle?" The reproach evidently struck home, for the elder said nothing. With the thoroughness characteristic of the habitual liar, Walter proceeded to add circumstance to his original statement. "I seen the buck whenst he fust kem sidlin' an' slippin' up ter the water, oneasy an' onsartain from the fust minute. I hed jes' sighted my rifle. An' hyar ye kem, a-bulgin' out o' the lau'l, an' sp'iled my shot." As the verisimilitude of his representations bore upon him, he unconsciously assumed the sentiments natural to the situation simulated. "Who tole ye ez I war hyar, anyhows?" he demanded angrily. "'Dosia," replied Justus Hoxon in a mild tone. Then, with an effort at exculpation, "I 'lowed ye'd be keen--plumb sharp set--fur news 'bout the prospec's o' the 'lection. An' she 'lowed ez ye hed kem down hyar hopin' ter git a deer. 'T war The'dosia."