Ducks flew by no higher than the tops of the willow trees up the bar, their wings whistling and their voices eager in the dark. The lurkers saw these birds darting by like black streaks, tempting vain shots, but they were old hunters, and knew they wanted at least a little light. Over on the mainland they heard the noises of wilderness animals, and away off yonder a mule's "he-haw" reverberated through the bottoms and over bars and river. For these things, if the pirates had only known it, they found the world endurable. Each in his own pit, given over to his own thoughts, they thrilled to the joy of living. All they wanted, really, was this kind of thing; hunting in fall and winter, fishing in the summer, and occasional visits to town for another kind of thrill, another sort of excitement. But their boyhood had been passed in privation, their youth amid temptations of appetite and vice, and now they were hopelessly mixed as to what they liked, what they didn't like, what the world would do for them, and what they would do to the world. Weaklings, uneducated, without balance; habit-ridden, yet with all that miserable inheritance from the world, they waited there rigid, motionless, their hearts thrilling to the increasing music of the march of dawn across the bottoms of the Mississippi. False dawn flushed and faded almost like a deliberate lightning flash. Then dawn appeared, marking down the gray lines of the wilderness trees with one stroke, sweeping out all the stars with another brush, revealing the flocks of birds glistening against the sky while yet the earth was in shade. The watchers spied a score of birds, great geese far to the northward, coming right in line with them. They waited for a few seconds--ages long. Then one of the men cried: "They're stoopin', boys! They're comin'!" The wild geese, coming down a magnificent slant from a mile height, headed straight for Yankee Bar. Will birds never learn? They ploughed down with their wings folding, and poised. Their voices grew louder and louder as they approached. With a hissing roar of their wings they pounded down out of the great, safe heights and circled around and inward. With a shout the three men started up through their masks and with levelled guns opened fire. Too late the old gander at the point of the "V" began to climb; too late the older birds in the point screamed and gathered their strength. The river men turned their black muzzles against the necks of the young tail birds of the feathered procession and brought them tumbling down out of the line to the ground, where on the hard sand two of them split their breasts and exposed thick layers of fat dripping with oil. The cries of the fleeing birds, the echoes of the barking guns, died away. The men shouted their joy in their success, gathered up their victims, scurried pack to cover, brushing over their tracks, and crouched down again, to await another flock.