hens wouldn’t lay; so he goes up to 
Tuckerton and snoops around another fel- 
low’s hen house, to see what he give them 
to make ’em lay Soon he spies a bottle 
marked, ‘Carbolic Acid.’ So he don’t say 
nawthin’, but buys him a bottle and 
puts it in the water for all his fowl. 
Next day they all lay dead; so he hove 
’em all into yonder pit up on the hill — 
nigh on two hundred hens, he had. 
“ ‘I’m through!’ he yelps, — and pikes 
out’n here for Georgy. Ye can have th’ 
hull place, now. Make y’rselves to hum 
(we had) an’ I’ll be round, come dawn, 
with Jim-dog here.” 
N ext moming we were off up the 
road. Jim and Mike lit out ahead 
in wide casts. Except for the ab- 
sence of cotton fields, it reminded you 
very much of the South. The same pine 
uplands surrounded the brown fields; the 
same patches of pea and corn stubble 
formed feeding grounds for the birds. 
Twice the dogs made game, but it was 
early and cold, and they lost the scent. 
A little later the bark of guns in those 
same fields told that someone follow'ing us 
had been more successful. I should say 
that, in a lucky moming, one ought to 
pick up ten bevies of quail in a circuit of 
five miles in that country. 
When we came to the old lady’s, the 
birds jumped without warning out of an 
old flower bed, and there was a fusillade 
of scattered fire. Jeff and Stick each 
knocked dowm one, and I divided my shot 
between the shingles of an outhouse and 
a big fat one who was zipping past its 
corner. We never found him. Marking 
dowm the birds, we followed up along a 
border of catbrier and scrub trees that 
divided the field from a salt meadow. 
Then Jim came to a point, and Mike 
backed him! A single got up and shot 
across my front. I dropped him; and 
then, in exactly the same path, a second 
one flew out, — and I grassed him also! 
The two birds lay within a hands-breadth 
of each other, the oddest double I ever 
made! Meanwhile Stick had stopped a 
straightaway ahead of him, and Jeff had 
hung one up in the briers. In all, there 
Food for the frying pan 
, must have been ten singles in that covey, 
and they gave us an exciting quarter 
hour. Part of them flew on along the 
border and the rest managed to cross the 
field in front of our battery. 
We decided to separate, and Herman 
took Mike and scouted up along the bor- 
der, while the rest of us crossed the field 
and plunged into a dense thicket of white 
cedars. Here w'as snap shooting of the 
tightest variety, with birds whirring 
through the bushy cedars. Stick managed 
to stop another, and the double report of 
Herman’s Smith told that he had taken 
toll of his bevy. 
We decided that this covey had been 
punished enough, and so went on, crossing 
an apple orchard with fresh buck tracks 
in it, made that morning, and circling 
do\m to the water front. This should more 
properly be called the marsh front, for 
endless miles of brown marsh grass led 
the eye out to where sloop sails could be 
descried in the bay. Here, in a big corn 
field, both Jim and Mike made game. It 
was warm, now, nearly twelve o’clock, 
and the birds had been out feeding and 
then had retired to the brush to rest and 
dust themselves. 
All this, the dogs told us, as they 
worked over the intricate tracks out on 
the field and then went into the scrub. 
Again and again they froze, and we would 
close up, only to have the dogs begin 
reading again. Finally, after fifteen min- 
utes of it, Jlike and Jim both stopped, at 
opposite angles ; canine statues that would 
make a sportsman’s heart leap! The in- 
tersection of the lines from each dog’s 
tail to nose told us just where they were — 
right in the center of a knee-deep huckle- 
berry pocket. We walked up, gingerly — 
and then! — Wheel A double bevy! 
At least thirty brown feathered bullets 
rose in a roar of wings and separated, 
one hatch passing Jeff and Stick to the 
left, while the other drove past Herman 
and me to the right. I have only seen 
that covey beaten once, and that was at 
Gadsden, South Carolina! As with most 
huge bevys, the results were meager. Two 
of us doubled on one big cock bird as big 
as a house; one was but wing tipped 
and got off into the thick brush, and the 
dogs only brought two birds to bag. Isn’t 
it always so when the big covey of the day 
smashes up? Boys, — am I right? 
W E pushed on after the singles. 
This is not the sport that one gets 
in the South, where the dogs pick 
them up in long-leaf pine groves and a 
man can see to shoot and has his mind on 
one bird at a time. This covey lit down 
in knee-deep huckleberries, with scrags 
overhead so dense that an angleworm 
would find himself braided into a mess 
of Garrick bends before he got through. 
It was the toughest going I ever “seen,” 
as the cowman said; and I got just one 
good poke, a single that let us walk right 
over him and then came on hurtling over 
my head through the pines when Stick 
stepped on him. The rest just lay close. 
We waited half an hour for them to begin 
whistling together, and, when that process 
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 622) 
Finally M'ke and Jim both stopped, at opposite angles; canine statues that would make a sportsman’s heart leap with joyl 
