dog; possibly he might own an old war musket bored out for shot.  Such an outfit was not adapted to quail shooting and especially to wing shooting, with which knowledge Dixie’s sportsmen were content.  Let the negro ramble about with his hound dog and his war musket; he couldn’t possibly kill the quail.  And so Uncle Ike’s grandson loafed and pottered about in the fields with his ax and his hound dogs, not doing so much harm to the quail but acquiring knowledge of the habits of the birds and skill as a still-hunting pot-hunter that would serve him well later on.  The negro belongs to a primitive race of people and all such races have keener eyes than white men whose fathers have pored over lines of black and white.  He learned to see the rabbit in its form, the squirrels in the leafy trees, and the quails huddled in the grass.  The least shade of gray in the shadow of the creek bank he distinguished at once as a rabbit, a glinting flash from a tree top he knew instantly as being caused by the slight movement of a hidden squirrel, and the quiver of a single stem of sedge grass told him of a bevy of birds hiding in the depths.  The pot-hunting negro has all the skill of the Indian, has more industry in his loafing, and kills without pity and without restraint.  This grandson of Uncle Ike was growing sulky, too, with the knowledge that the white man was bribing him with half a loaf to raise cotton and corn when he might as well exact it all.  And this he shortly did, as we shall see.

The time came when cotton went up to sixteen cents a pound and single breech-loading guns went down to five dollars apiece.  The negro had money now, and the merchants—­these men who had said let the nigger alone so long as he raises cotton and corn—­sold him the guns, a gun for every black idler, man and boy, in all the South.  Then shortly a wail went up from the sportsmen, “The niggers are killing our quail.”  They not only were killing them, but most of the birds were already dead.  On the grounds of the Southern Field Club where sixty bevies were raised by the dogs in one day, within two years but three bevies could be found in a day by the hardest kind of hunting; and this story was repeated all over the South.  Now the negro began to raise bird dogs in place of hounds, and he carried his new gun to church if services happened to be held on a week day.  Finally the negro had grown up and had compassed his ambition:  he could shoot partridges flying just the same as a white man, was a white man except for a trifling difference in color; and he could kill more birds, too, three times as many.  It was merely a change from the old order to the new in which a dark-skinned “sportsman” had taken the place in plantation life of the dear old “Colonel” of loved memory.  The negro had exacted his price for raising cotton and corn.

[Illustration:  THE SOUTHERN-NEGRO METHOD OF COMBING OUT THE WILD LIFE “Our colored sportsman is gregarious at all times, but especially so in the matter of recreation.  He may slouch about alone, and pot a bevy or two of quail when in actual need of something to eat, or when he has a sale for the birds, but when it comes to shooting for fun he wants to be with the ’gang’.”—­Charles Askins.  Reproduced from Recreation Magazine.  By permission of the Outdoor World.]