"Did you think I was digging for fossils in a salt meadow?" queried the professor. "You can have read very little about the subject. I am digging for something quite different."
I was silent. I knew that my face was a trifle flushed. I longed to say, "Well, what the devil are you digging for?" but I only stared into the hole as though hypnotized.
"Captain McPeek and Frisby ought to be here," he said, looking first at Daisy and then across the meadows.
I ached to ask him why he had subpoenaed Captain McPeek and Frisby.
"They are coming," said Daisy, shading her eyes. "Do you see the speck on the meadows?"
"It may be a mud hen," said the professor.
"Miss Holroyd is right," I said. "A wagon and team and two men are coming from the north. There is a dog beside the wagon--it's that miserable yellow dog of Frisby's."
"Good gracious!" cried the professor, "you don't mean to tell me that you see all that at such a distance?"
"You will see that I'm right, presently," I laughed.
The professor removed his blue goggles and rubbed them, glancing obliquely at me.
"Haven't you heard what extraordinary eyesight duck shooters have?" said his daughter, looking back at her father. "Jack says that they can tell exactly what kind of a duck is flying before most people could see anything at all in the sky."
"It's true," I said; "it comes to anybody, I fancy, who has had practice."
The professor regarded me with a new interest. There was inspiration in his eyes. He turned toward the ocean. For a long time he stared at the tossing waves on the beach, then he looked far out to where the horizon met the sea.
"Are there any ducks out there?" he asked at last.
"Yes," said I, scanning the sea, "there are."
He produced a pair of binoculars from his coat-tail pocket, adjusted them, and raised them to his eyes.
I looked more carefully, holding both hands over my forehead.
"Surf ducks--scoters and widgeon. There is one bufflehead among them--no, two; the rest are coots," I replied.
"This," cried the professor, "is most astonishing. I have good eyes, but I can't see a blessed thing without these binoculars!"
"It's not extraordinary," said I; "the surf ducks and coots any novice might recognise; the widgeon and buffleheads I should not have been able to name unless they had risen from the water. It is easy to tell any duck when it is flying, even though it looks no bigger than a black pin-point."