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CHAPTER I

The black duck had a hard time of it from the beginning–that is, from the beginning of her life on the farm. She had been a free wild bird up to that time, swimming in the bay, playing hide-and-seek with her brothers and sisters and cousins among the marsh reeds along the bank, and coquettishly diving for “mummies” and catching them “on the swim” whenever she craved a fishy morsel. This put a fresh perfume on her breath, and made her utterly charming to her seventh cousin, Sir Sooty Drake, who always kept himself actually fragrant with the aroma of raw fish, and was in all respects a dashing beau. Indeed, she was behaving most coyly, daintily swimming in graceful curves around Sir Sooty among the marsh-mallow clumps at the mouth of “Tarrup Crik,” when the shot was fired that changed all her prospects in life.

The farmer’s boy was a hunter, and so had been his grandfather, and his grandfather’s gun did its work with a terrific old-fashioned explosion.

When it shot into the great clump of pink mallows everything trembled. The air was full of smoke, and for a distance of a quarter of a mile away the toads crept out of their hiding and looked up and down the road. The chickens picking at the late raspberry bushes in the farmer’s yard craned their necks, blinked, and didn’t swallow another berry for fully ten seconds. And a beautiful green caterpillar, that had seen the great red rooster mark him with his evil eye, and expected to be gobbled up in a twinkling, had time to “hump himself” and crawl under a leaf before the astonished rooster recovered from the noise. This is a case where the firing of a gun saved at least one life. I wonder how many butterflies owe their lives to that gun?

As to the ducks in the clump of mallows that caught the volley, they simply tumbled over and gave themselves up for dead.

The heroine of our little story, Lady Quackalina Blackwing, stayed in a dead faint for fully seventeen seconds, and the first thing she knew when she “came to” was that she was lying under the farmer boy’s coat in an old basket, and that there was a terrific rumbling in her ears and a sharp pain in one wing, that something was sticking her, that Sir Sooty was nowhere in sight, and that she wanted her mother and all her relations.

Indeed, as she began to collect her senses, while she lay on top of the live crab that pinched her chest with his claw, she realized that there was not a cousin in the world, even to some she had rather disliked, that she would not have been most happy to greet at this trying moment.

The crab probably had no unfriendly intention. He was only putting up the best hand he had, trying to find some of his own kindred. He had himself been lying in a hole in shallow water when the farmer’s boy raked him in and changed the whole course of his existence.

He and the duck knew each other by sight, but though they were both “in the swim,” they belonged to different sets, and so were small comfort to one another on this journey to the farm.

They both knew some English, and as the farmer’s boy spoke part English and part “farm,” they understood him fairly well when he was telling the man digging potatoes in the field that he was going to “bile” the crab in a tomato can and to make a “decoy” out of the duck.

“Bile” and “decoy” were new words to the listeners in the basket, but they both knew about tomato cans. The bay and “Tarrup Crik” were strewn with them, and the crab had once hidden in one, half imbedded in the sand, when he was a “soft-shell.” He knew their names, because he had studied them before their labels soaked off, and he knew there was no malice in them for him, though the young fishes who have soft outsides dreaded their sharp edges very much. There is sometimes some advantage in having one’s skeleton on the surface, like a coat of mail.