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 tense, unwavering orbs. Then he shouldered his gun and started homeward.

Before him at the top of the rise loomed the massive trunk of the great black oak which had played so singular a part in the afternoon's events. Mayfield knew that the eyes which had watched him from behind that oak still waited there. Yet he walked straight towards the tree, his gun slung carelessly across his shoulder. Only the odd contraction of the thin nostrils above his white mustache revealed his knowledge of a crisis yet to come.

He was abreast of the black oak, even a step or two beyond it, when he stopped short and turned his head quickly.

"Why, hello, Sam Woodfin!" he exclaimed.

The man who stood behind the black oak—a big man, bushy-browed, clad in corduroys and hunting boots, a rifle balanced in his right hand—glared at the hunter sternly out of stony gray eyes. On his shirt under the flap of his coat gleamed a game warden's badge. The blackness of his frown, the bulging veins in his forehead, were mute evidences of his temper. With an effort he spoke calmly.

"Mayfield," he said, "you don't like me and I don't like you, and some day I'm going to get you for killing deer out o' season. But there's one or two things I want to ask you. When did you learn that I was watching you from behind this oak?"

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38 that an average rate of five persons per house would not be too high. The entire population is thus made to stand as follows

Of this number not more than an eightieth part would appear to be Musalmans, foreigners, and casual residents, and Mr. Stirling, adopting the average suggested by the returns most to be relied on, estimates the number of children under ten years at about one-third of the whole population.

Indigenous Schools.—Mr. Stirling, in the elaborate account of this district, from which the preceding details are abridged, gives no information whatever on the state of education as conducted by Natives, either in elementary schools or schools of learning. In the description of the town of Puri Jugunnath, it is stated that “the principal street is composed almost entirely of the religious establishments called maths” a name applied in other parts of the country, both in the west and south, to convents of ascetics in which the various branches of Hindoo learning are taught. It may be inferred that they are applied to the same use in Jugunnauth Puri.

In November 1814, the Collector of Cuttack submitted to the Governor General in Council several documents, relative to a claim set up by Maulavi Abdul Karim to a pension or payment of one rupee per diem, which had been allowed by the former Government for the support of a madrasa in the village of Burbah, near Futtaspore, in the Mahratta Pergunnahs of Hidgelee. After a careful examination of the documents, the claim appearing to be valid, the Government authorised the payment of the pension with arrears. This allowance has since been paid annually, Sa. Rupees 365; but I have not been able to learn any thing of the madrasa for the support of which the grant is made.

The only other reference I have observed, connected with education in this district, is in the answer made by the local agents to Government to the inquiries of the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1824, to the effect that they knew of no endowments or funds applicable to the object of public education in the district.

Elementary Schools not Indigenous.—The Missionaries of the General Baptist Missionary Society have, under their superintendence, twelve elementary schools, supported partly by that Missionary Society, and partly by benevolent individuals, friends of education. In these schools about 219 children are taught their Native language, principally by reading the Christian scriptures

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 Mayfield seemed to consider.

Bout a half-hour befo' that doe come out o' the swamp," he answered.

"How'd you spot me?"

Sandy Jim appeared to ignore this second question. "Ain't it funny, Sam," he said in a tone of utmost friendliness, "how fashions change? I was thinkin' about it while I was settin' down yunder by the swamp obsarvin' natur' an' listenin' to the birds a-singin'."

"What's that got to do with what I'm asking you?" growled the game warden.

"Well, you see, Sam, it's like this. A while ago everybody was smokin' them cigarettes that come in a brown paper—I dun'no what you call 'em, not bein' a smoker myself. Then, by an' by, white cigarettes got to be the fashion, an' now there's only two men in this part o' the county that smokes browns—you an' Pete Mason. Henry Harvey down at the store was tellin' me the other day that he wouldn't never sell any browns ef 'twarn't fer you an' Pete."

"Well?" snapped the warden.

"Well," Sandy Jim drawled, "I'm a old hound but I got a pretty good nose. I don't smoke myself, but I kin smell a cigarette 'most a hundred yards ef the wind's right. When I got a whiff of one of the old browns—they got a sweetish tang to

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 'em that the whites ain't got—I knowed that either you er Pete Mason was a little way up the wind from me; an' Pete ain't in the habit of snoopin' round in the woods."

Warden Sam Woodfin seemed to have lost the power of speech, but Sandy Jim continued earnestly, wagging his white head.

"They's bad things, Sam, them cigarettes. Used to call 'em coffin nails. An' they interfere with business. Ef it hadn't been fer that one you smoked a while ago, you'd have got the proof on old Jim Mayfield who yer been tryin' to ketch fer two years an' more."

Again the old man shook his head mournfully.

"She was a fine doe, Sam," he said, "an' I had her right at the end o' my gun. I shore hated to let her go."

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HALF-HOUR before dawn, in the cypress swamp where the wood ibis flock slept, strange, harsh, unearthly sounds broke the silence which hung over the moss-tapestried cypresses around the shores of the lagoon. These sounds came from the trees where the ibises were talking with one another, clacking their bills, extending and retracting their long necks, opening and folding their wings, impatiently awaiting the coming of day. From the woods came the eerie songs of two chuck-will's-widows answering each other across the still dark water, and presently, close at hand, a big swamp owl woke the echoes with his sonorous "Whoo whoo, whoo-whoo whoo-who-whoo-who." Then, when the first faint light had begun to filter down through the moss curtains of the trees, the eleven-foot alligator who was master of this lagoon sent his long, melancholy, tremulous challenge rolling and quavering through the woods, a resonant, menacing call, incredibly strange and wild.

Scarcely had its last note died when old Sanute, chief of the wood ibis army, craned his long neck,

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 spread his wide wings, and launched forward from his perch in the tallest of the cypresses. With a noisy flapping of great pinions which swayed and rocked the moss-pennants trailing from every branch, the whole ibis host, first in twos and threes, then in tens and twenties, took to the air. Their necks curving downward, their legs dangling, their ample wings laboring mightily, they lifted themselves in narrow circles through the mist—a whirling confusion of great white shapes dimly visible in the pallid light, passing and repassing like phantoms against the gray background of the curtained trees, spiraling upward to clear the cypress-tops.

For some minutes after the last of them had risen above the trees the whole flock swung in ever-widening circles above the forest, mounting steadily towards the higher level where the leader sailed back and forth, peering down with frequent twists and turns of his big, queer-looking head as though studying the maneuvers of his followers. Then, satisfied that the army was ready to begin its aërial march, he turned his long bill southeastward towards the distant sea marshes behind the barrier islands.

Very wise with the wisdom of many summers was Sanute, leader of the wood ibis host—very wise and very old. But it was not with him as with men. He had not paid in physical vigor for the knowledge which the years had brought. Despite

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 his age, he was as strong as he ever had been, as tireless, as active, as quick of sight and of hearing.

A certain beauty he had even when seen standing at rest, though his long legs and neck, his naked head, and long heavy bill curved towards the tip and much stouter than that of a heron, made him appear a fantastic, even a grotesque, figure, according well with the uncouth and ghostly background of the lagoon where the ibises slept. But it was in the high air and in the full light of the sun that he was at his best. Then—his neck and legs stretched to the utmost, his wide wings, more than six feet from tip to tip, fully extended—he was a splendid and memorable sight as he sailed and circled two hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand feet above the marshes, looking down upon his fellows. Always, when soaring thus, Sanute mounted well above all the other birds of the ibis flock, for he was larger than any of the others and stronger of wing and he liked to exhibit his supremacy. And of them all he was not only the largest and strongest but also the handsomest. Time had not dulled his colors but had brightened and intensified them. His yellowish-brown bill was yellower than theirs; his long legs and the sides of his naked head were bluer; his body and wings were of a purer and more brilliant whiteness; his tail and wing-tips, instead

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 of being dull black, glittered with a metallic green and purple iridescence.

The other ibises of the flock acknowledged without question the leadership which Sanute exercised. It was the due reward of his superior physical powers and of his experience and wisdom. Most of the other ibises were young birds, many of them birds of the year, fully grown but not yet attired in fully adult plumage. In the youngest of them the head and neck were not bare but were covered with short downy feathers and the white plumage showed in places a grayish cast. They were the novices of the flock, the raw recruits of the ibis army, beside whom the two-yearand three-year-old birds who made up the bulk of the host felt themselves veterans. In addition to these youngsters of varying degrees of immaturity and inexperience, the flock included a good many older birds, some of them almost as old as Sanute himself. They had joined the brigade after the breeding season was over and had journeyed under Sanute's leadership to the wide lonely sea marshes of the Low Country coast between the palm-fringed barrier islands and the forested mainland, marshes which for many summers had been the old ibis's favorite feeding ground.

It was towards these marshes that Sanute led his feathered troopers from their sleeping place in the cypress swamp. They flew high above the tree-tops

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 not only for safety's sake but also to clear the uppermost stratum of the morming mist spread like a blue-gray blanket over the forest, shutting it completely from view. Always old Sanute, jealous of his leadership, held the van, but the rest of the flock maintained no fixed or regular order. Sometimes they swept along over a broad curving front nearly five hundred feet from flank to flank. Again for a space they were strung out in single file or in two long, crooked, converging lines somewhat resembling the wedge-shaped formation of migrating geese; but generally they flew in a loose, rather irregular phalanx, perhaps four times as long as it was wide.

When they had left the denser forest behind them and were approaching the edge of the bay, the mist blanket seemed to slide away from under them and they looked down upon a green smiling country where patches of woodland alternated with cultivated fields. Here Sanute mounted fifty feet higher, and all his followers mounted after him. Thus, when they sighted the little house where Red Cam Reppington the hunter lived alone near the edge of Little Raccoon Swamp, they were well above shotgun range.

Red Cam, up earlier than usual, saw them when they were yet half a mile away. He knew that every morning the ibis army passed over his house en route from their secret sleeping place in the deep

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 cypress swamps to the salt marshes of the coast where they spent the forenoon feeding; but because the ibises were not game birds he had hitherto taken little interest in them and had never made special note of the precise time of their coming. They were at least half an hour earlier than he had expected, but, as it happened, this mattered little, since he had made his preparations the night before.

With practiced eye he measured the height of the approaching flock, then darted into the house. In a half-minute he was out again, carrying not his shotgun but the high-powered rifle which he had placed, loaded and ready, just inside his door. Careful to keep himself out of sight, he crouched at the corner of the house, awaiting the moment which would offer him the best chance—the moment when the great ibis leading the oncoming host would be almost directly over him.

At best it was a question of luck. To hit his moving target at that height with a single bullet was a feat which even Red Cam, one of the best shots in the Low Country, could not perform unless fortune stood his friend. But Lady Luck, as he was fond of calling her, had often befriended Cam both in the woods and elsewhere, and he risked nothing by again invoking her aid. A wry grin twisted his florid, sullen face as he thought of what a tri-

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 umph it would be to leave Sanute's severed head on the doorstep of a certain cottage that night as proof that when Cameron Reppington uttered a threat he would swiftly make it good.

Sanute knew nothing of rifles. But he knew as much as a bird can know about shotguns and he was serenely aware that no shotgun roaring at him from Red Cam's yard could possibly hurt him or any of his flock at the height at which they were traveling. Nevertheless, when his quick eye caught a spurt of flame and a tiny puff of white smoke far below him at the corner of Cam's house, the big bird seemed to rear and stagger in the air. Yet he did not fall. Instead, he evidently rose; for in an instant he was hidden from Cam's view by the vanguard of the ibis army rushing past beneath him.

Not all of them passed. A young ibis, a bird of the year, which had been flying directly behind Sanute, his bill almost touching the tips of the leader's extended feet, crumpled and dropped like a stone.

Cam growled an oath. Old Sanute had proved his cunning, halting in the air at the flash of the rifle and swerving upward so that even if the bullet had been perfectly aimed it would have passed harmlessly in front of him. Cam cursed himself and Lady Luck impartially. He did not bother to pick up the dead ibis where it plumped to earth beside a clump of yuccas. It was a young bird, he

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 knew, and he could not substitute its feathered head for the bare head of Sanute, the veteran. Leaving it for his dog Brutus or for the turkey vultures, who would find it soon enough if Brutus scorned it, he turned back indoors to cook his breakfast.

Three miles beyond Cam Reppington's house, on a low bluff over-looking the wide emerald marshes of the bay, stood the small, white, vine-covered cottage where John Marston lived with his blue-eyed, brown-haired granddaughter Ellen. He, too, was astir early but no earlier than was his habit; for the little old man, as all the bay-dwellers called him, loved the fragrance and freshness of the June dawns even better than the crimson glories of the June sunsets, and nearly always he was up and dressed before the sun rose from behind the woods on the distant barrier islands along the edge of the sea.

There was another reason why, when June had come to the Low Country, John Marston seldom lay late abed. June brought the wood ibises to his marshes—tall, fantastic, long-necked and long-legged black and white storks that somehow gave him more pleasure than any others of the marshland birds; and early every morning from June to October an army of wood ibises, headed by an old ibis whom Marston had known for years and to whom

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 he had given the name of an Indian warrior famous long ago in the Low Country, passed over the cottage bound for their feeding grounds on the salt flats. Marston, a lover of all wild creatures, a born naturalist with something of the poet in him, always found rare delight in watching the feathered army pass, and sometimes he would call excitedly to Ellen, busy indoors preparing breakfast, to come out on the porch and share the wonder of the spectacle.

But this morning the little old man, sitting in his favorite chair on the porch awaiting the ibises' coming, would hardly call his granddaughter. His mind was troubled. His sun-tanned face wore a frown and the vivid blue eyes above his short white beard were strangely cold and hard. He was thinking of Red Cam's oath and of the quarrel that had led to it and of what might come of it.

Cam Reppington, a gentleman born, could play the gentleman when he wanted to; and Ellen, whatever she might have heard, had never seen him drunk. In the old city days, which had ended with the fatal affair of the bank's money, he had been a clever hand with women; and when this girl took his fancy he had not found it hard to lie his way into her good graces so that for a while she had overruled her grandfather's objections to Cam's visits.

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 At last she had realized the truth and had turned from him in disgust, loathing herself because for a time she had tolerated him. So, when Cam came again, John Marston had shown him the door; and Red Cam, redder than ever with rage, restrained only by Ellen's presence from driving his fist into the old man's face, had sworn to have revenge. At most of his threats Marston smiled because they were too dire to be fulfilled; but there was one that worried him, since it was a threat which Cam might safely carry out if he could compass its execution. It was the recollection of this threat that plagued John Marston as he sat on his porch smoking his long-stemmed pipe, awaiting the coming of the ibis host.

Presently he saw it, at first a mere speck against the sky to the northward, a speck which grew and lengthened and widened. Soon it had the appearance of a wavering black line above the woods; and then as it drew swiftly nearer it became a regiment of great long-necked birds as big as geese sweeping through the air in a wide curved rank like a bent bow two hundred feet above the trees.

With shining eyes Marston watched them as they came on, planing downward as they left the woods behind them and drew nearer the edge of the wide marsh plain. The army was almost directly over him now, one great bird larger and whiter than the

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 rest leading the way. He could hear the swish of the broad black-edged wings and could almost distinguish the color of the dark-brown eyes in the great elongated heads which, as though weighed down by the long, curved, heavy bills, were carried a little low. Both joy and trouble were in the little old man's face as, tilting back in his chair, he peered up at them as they passed—a splendid sight, indeed, their big white bodies and wings shining like silver in the morning light.

"There they go," he muttered, "old Sanute in command."

For a half-minute after the last of them had passed he continued to gaze upward. Slowly the delight which the spectacle of the ibis army never failed to bring him faded from his face as though yielding reluctantly to some insidious, repugnant thought which would not be denied.

"So Cam's going to kill you, is he?" he said aloud—"going to kill you and send me your head? Well, you're a wise old chief, Sanute, and Red Cam will never lift your scalp."

The boast seemed to dispel his fears. For a moment he smiled. But almost instantly the smile vanished. The vivid blue eyes hardened and narrowed and with a bang he brought down the uptilted legs of his chair.

"By God!" he exclaimed, striking his clenched

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 fist into his palm, "I've stood all I'm going to stand! If Red Cam kills him I'll kill Cam."

Some five hours later, Sanute the wood ibis, standing in the water at the mouth of a small marsh gully, decided that one more mullet would be enough. His gullet was already crammed full, but he rejoiced in an exceedingly hearty appetite and he could accommodate another fish if it were not too large. The ibis army, breaking up into detachments, had scattered widely over the marshes, and then, dividing into still smaller squads, the ibises had set about getting breakfast. But Sanute fished alone, as always. He wanted no clumsy, bumptious, more or less inexpert youngster near him when he waded into the shallows of some sinuous marsh brook and grappled with the important business of satisfying that imperious appetite.

Tide had passed the half-ebb. The water was swirling out of the steep-sided, flat-bottomed gully in which he stood, his shoulders humped, his long neck extended, his big solemn-looking head cocked knowingly on one side. From time to time during the morning he had danced awkwardly about in the shallows, scratching the soft bottom of the gully to stir up the mud; then thrusting his bill into the cloudy water, he had held it there for a while, the scythe-like, sharp-edged mandibles partly open. The

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 shrimp were not yet as large or as abundant as they would be later in the season, but the water flowing through his mandibles brought a good many little transparent crustaceans into the trap and few of these ever got out.

Now, however, he wanted no more shrimp, but a nice mullet with which to complete his meal; and, besides, the conditions were no longer auspicious for shrimp-fishing. A four-foot shark, whose dorsal and tail fins moved slowly back and forth across the mouth of the gully where it opened into a large marsh invaded Sanute's fishing ground, and  shark had ever attacked him, the old ibis preferred to hold his head high so that he could keep an eye on this intruder.

Presently his opportunity came. The heavy curved bill, its mandibles closed, shot down into the water and instantly rose again. It was a lightning-like stroke, powerful enough to stagger a raccoon if it had landed between the eyes, and in a moment a six-inch mullet, insensible or perhaps already dead, swirled to the surface of the little eddy at the edge of which the ibis stood.

Striding forward, he seized the fish, turned it deftly in his bill and swallowed it headforemost. Wading ashore, he took three quick steps over the hard, sun-baked mud between the water and the marsh; then, his Jong neck curving downward, his

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 long legs dangling, he lifted himself with swift, strong wing beats into the air.

As he spiraled upward, Sanute surveyed the green salt prairies spread beneath him—the wide sea marshes stretching away northeastward and southwestward as far as his eye could see, bounded on one side by the forest of the distant Low Country mainland and on the other by the semi-tropical woods on the long narrow barrier islands beyond which lay the ocean. Above him, around him and below him he saw other ibises, some of them fishing at the mouths of little gullies opening into the tidal creeks which wound everywhere through the marshes; some sunning themselves in closely bunched flocks on shell mounds or heaps of sedge piled up by the tides; others winging their way lazily, with three or four wing beats, then a long graceful sail, towards the barrier island jungle; still others soaring beautifully on motionless pinions high in the windless upper air under the deep-blue June sky.

He saw also a pair of eagles soaring higher than the highest of the ibises; an osprey poising and hovering over a marsh creek where it opened into a broad shallow sound; scores of herons—great blues, little blues and Louisianas—passing back and forth beneath him with measured wing beats or fishing along the edges of the sinuous waterways; a squadron of brown pelicans floating on the surface of a

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 wide creek near an inlet; a flock of more than fifty tall, glistening egrets completely covering, as though a shining white blanket were spread over it, the low, dense cassena thicket on a little hummock in the marsh. All these, and the long-winged royal terns and skimmers, the loquacious rails and willets, the handsome black and white red-billed oystercatchers, the graceful least terns, and the busy, restless sandpiper regiments on the curving inlet shore were familiar sights to Sanute and they interested him little. He had fed even more bounteously than usual. The languor of complete satiety was upon him. It was time for his midday siesta.

Some whim turned his bill towards the distant mainland woods instead of the barrier island jungle where he usually took his noon nap. Perhaps it was the sight of the egrets on the hummock far beneath him which put the notion in his head, for the place that he had in mind was a certain cypress-bordered freshwater lagoon where a great egret city was situated. Perhaps Fate had something to do with it—Fate which often, like an all-powerful, relentless genie or wizard of the wilderness, seems to arrange with the most minute care those tragic dramas of the woods which are none the less real because man so seldom witnesses them.

At any rate, when Sanute, after mounting almost as high as the towering eagles, set out for the lonely

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 lagoon of the egrets some ten miles or more away, the little old man who lived in the white vine-covered cottage by the shore of the bay, was sitting on an oak stump beside that lagoon, feasting his eyes on the beauty of the tall milk-white birds perching in scores and hundreds in the young feathery-foliaged cypresses fringing the egret lake. And at that same moment Red Cam, his shotgun balanced in his tight hand, his black mongrel Brutus following at his heels, was making his way through the mixed forest of pine, oak and hickory in the midst of which lay the secluded serpentine backwater where the plumed white birds had their town.

A definite purpose had brought Cam to those woods. An inveterate hunter, he spent most of his time roaming with his gun. Laws and seasons were nothing to him. At all seasons he killed whatever game crossed his path. On this June day he was hopeful that Lady Luck would show him a wild turkey and he was working down through the woods towards the lagoon because a few days before he had seen the sign of a big gobbler in a certain swale near the water's edge. But John Marston had come to the lagoon by mere accident—or so he would have said if he had been asked about it, though it is possible that the woods genie, preparing the drama to be enacted there that day, was responsible for the chance which had turned him aside from his path.

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 Tramping through the woods on his way to a certain lotus pond where many purple gallinules nested and reared their young, he had seen a large flock of egrets pass over high above the pines, flying eastward. They were bound, he knew, for the egret city, and reflecting that more than a week had passed since he had visited the place and that the young egrets would now be well grown, he had decided to let the gallinules wait for a day and had followed the big white birds.

For an hour he had been sitting on his oak stump beside the southern shore of the lagoon, an ideal post from which to watch the teeming life of the town. As always when he visited the egret metropolis, the wonder of it took possession of him. It was like a scene from another and more fantastic world, and the little old man, though skillful with words, had never been able to describe it.

To his right the tall, smooth, columnar trunks of great cypresses towered above the still water, their branches clothed with a gray spectral witchery of Spanish moss; but in front of him and to his left the cypress woods fell away and he looked out upon an open sunny lake walled in by young, dark-green, full-foliaged trees. In these marginal cypress woods and in small cypress groves and willow clumps rising here and there from the surface of the lake the egrets had their nests, nests which seemed innumer-

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 able, ten or twelve or even a score of nests to each small tree. And everywhere—on the nests, in the trees and in the air—the great snowy birds, buoyant as air itself, graceful beyond description, adorned with long delicate plumes which drooped beyond their tails, perched and circled and soared.

John Marston sat like one entranced. For ten years or more he had visited the egret city many times each spring and summer; yet its magic never grew stale. His gaze shifted from point to point of the bewildering, ever-changing panorama before him; now resting upon a lone pyramidal cypress near the center of the lake where more than fifty egrets, young birds and adults, crowded together so closely as to hide almost entirely the lustrous foliage of the tree; now lingering upon a dead cypress-top across the lagoon where four big black snakebirds or anhingas, grotesque reminders of the incredible bird-reptiles of the incredible past, stood with their long sombre wings half-opened to the sun while all around them in the air white egrets and smaller blue herons, which shared the egret city, sailed and swerved—a kaleidoscopic aërial whirlpool of color and life.

Often the little old man's eyes, as though fascinated by the sight, returned to a spot near the middle of the lagoon where three great alligators

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 lay between two lily-pad islands, their huge shapeless heads and jagged black backs showing above the surface. Even more potently than the snakebirds these long armored dragons of the waters carried his mind back to the fantastic Ancient World—back and back, across ages and æons, to that remote and seemingly fabulous time when the giant reptiles of the dinosaur dynasty ruled the earth. For this reason, despite their hideousness, he found delight in the big saurians also; and because those rugged, plated, sinister heads protruding from the dark water were an essential part of the outlandish magic of the lagoon, he looked for them always when he came to the egret town.

He was watching the motionless, seemingly lifeless 'gators when above them and farther to the left he saw Sanute the wood ibis sail into view over the tree-tops and come to rest on a dead cypress standing well out of the water. Marston recognized the big bird at once. He had known Sanute too well and too long to make any mistake; and he wondered what obscure chance had caused the ibis chief to return to the mainland for his midday Siesta instead of resorting as usual to the barrier island woods. He watched the big bird dispose himself comfortably on a limb of the dead cypress, unmindful of the transitory excitement of the egrets and herons who had their homes nearby; then Mar-

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 ston's gaze wandered off to settle once more upon the three big reptilian masters of the lagoon.

He did not know that other eyes as keen and almost as practiced as his own had seen the ibis alight and had recognized the bird with equal certainty. Red Cam had been slowly making his way down through the woods on the opposite side of the lagoon. He had seen no sign of the gobbler for which he was looking and presently he sat down to rest at the foot of a big sycamore a few yards from the edge of the water.

Munching a chunk of bread, washed down with copious draughts from his flask, he talked to the black mongrel Brutus, as was his habit, grumbling about his luck, which seemed to have deserted him. Again and again, as the liquor worked on him, his thoughts returned to Ellen and her grandfather; and these too he cursed, vehemently, obscenely, laying his grievance before the dog as though the animal understood his words.

A swift shadow slid past him and in the midst of a tirade Cam glanced up quickly. It was not a turkey, as he had hoped, but a wood ibis, and, craning his neck to see beyond the willows fringing the lagoon, he watched the big bird alight on a dead limb far out over the water. A grin overspread his flushed face as he gazed. He rose hastily, reached for his gun, and, bidding Brutus

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 follow close at heel, slunk away amid the tree trunks.

Red Cam moved swiftly with lynx-like litheness. The liquor which heated his brain and loosened his tongue while he rested under the sycamore seemed not to impair in the slightest his accustomed skill in all the arts of the woods. He knew well the wariness of the old ibis and he knew that his only chance of getting within range lay in crawling almost to the end of a low, narrow, reed-grown tongue of land, lined with willows and studded with upstanding cypress knees, extending well out into the lagoon. This would be no easy task, yet Cam felt that his luck had turned. Weeks or months might pass before he had another opportunity as good as this one to carry out the threat which was to be part of his revenge on the man he hated.

Sanute stood on his cypress limb, languid, motionless, seemingly asleep. His long neck was drawn in between his hunched shoulders, his heavy bill rested on his chest. He looked a picture of lazy, drowsy contentment. Often his eyes remained closed for minutes at a time; yet, though he seemed to doze, he was aware, by sight or sound, of nearly every unusual incident in the life of the lagoon around him.

Sometimes circling egrets passed so near him as almost to touch him with their snowy wings. A

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 combative anhinga lit on the end of the cypress limb, stabbed at him with straight, sharp, javelin-like beak, and departed only when the ibis's neck suddenly lengthened and his stout bill lunged viciously at the intruder. Through lids that seemed to be tightly closed he saw a copper-backed red-bellied snake draw its glittering length out of the water and glide silently along a half-submerged log sixty feet below him; and once, when he appeared to be sunk in slumber, he caught the faint sucking noise made by a prowling raccoon as it drew its foot out of the soft clinging mud on the margin of the lagoon. But no sound came to him from the narrow willow-covered peninsula where Red Cam crawled slowly and laboriously through the muck, drawing nearer and nearer inch by inch, black Brutus crawling at his heels; and except when the light breeze stirred them, not a reed or a willow branch moved.

A half-hour passed. . . . A thunderous crashing roar shook the air of the egret city. Up from the trees on every side rose the startled egrets and herons in white and blue-gray clouds, croaking loud cries of alarm; and down from his perch on the cypress limb pitched Sanute the ibis, one great wing beating frantically—straight down into the waters of the lagoon close to the foot of the dead cypress.

John Marston, now standing tiptoe on his stump some seventy yards away on the other shore, saw

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 Red Cam's burly, brown-shirted figure rise among the willows on the tongue of land near the tree in which the ibis had been perching and heard his hoarse shout of triumph.

The little old man's sun-tanned face flamed with the fury that possessed him. His blue eyes narrowed and glittered like sword-points; his breath came short and fast.

Yet instantly he realized his helplessness. There was nothing that he could do. He had no weapon and Cam had his shotgun. Later, he said to himself through clamped teeth, there would be a reckoning. For the present he stood still on his oak stump and watched. Unseen himself, he could see all that happened; and he saw that the ibis had not been killed but was swimming towards a little island in the lagoon formed by the reed-covered carcass of an ancient cypress which had fallen many years before.

Red Cam, thrusting the willow branches aside, peered out over the water to find his victim. He knew by the manner of the big bird's fall that its wing had been broken, and if this was the ibis's only injury the bird might yet escape him. Without stopping to replace the spent cartridge, he leveled his gun for a shot with the other barrel. But when he tried to draw his bead the swimming bird shimmered and danced before his eyes.

Cam swore, swaying on his feet as he strove to

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 steady the gun. The liquor had him at last, taking possession of him suddenly as it so often did—laying hold of him all at once when the mental tension which had held his nerves taut was abruptly ended by the successful shot which had brought the ibis down.

Yet he must shoot and shoot quickly, for the crippled bird had nearly reached the reedy island of the cypress log. It was only when Cam tried to draw a fine sight along his gun barrel that his target jigged so madly before him in a dull red mist. Wide-eyed, his vision was fairly steady, fairly clear. Throwing the gun to his shoulder, he pulled trigger the moment the wavering muzzle covered the bird.

To the right of the ibis and behind him the water seethed and foamed where the scattering turkey shot peppered it. Sanute swam on. In another quarter-minute he had gained the half-submerged log and had clambered up its sloping side. There he stood, his bill gaping, his left wing drooping, his tall, bulky, white body overtopping the tallest of the reeds.

Red Cam, gripping a willow branch to hold himself steady, fumbled at his waist with the other hand. He could no longer trust his eye to measure distance accurately, but he believed that the ibis was still within long range. He would reload and shoot again and continue shooting until he hit the

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 mark. But the hand that fumbled for the cartridge belt fumbled in vain; and Cam cursed again as he remembered that when he had sat down to rest under the sycamore he had removed the belt because it chafed his side.

It would take ten minutes or more to get the belt and return, but there was nothing else to be done. Turning, he stumbled over Brutus, the lanky black mongrel, sitting just behind him, as always eagerly awaiting his commands. An idea flashed into Cam's muddled brain. Stooping, he spoke to the dog, patting the animal's sleek head and pointing out over the lagoon.

Black Brutus knew instantly what was expected of him. And instantly he obeyed. The love that he bore this surly master of his was a strange thing, and not less strange was the boundless faith which now sent him unfaltering into waters where he would never have ventured of his own accord. A Low Country dog, whelped and reared in the Low Country and all his life a rover of the Low Country woods, he knew the dangers which lurked for him and all his race in the dark wine-colored waters of the cypress lagoons. But his master had spoken—the master who was his only friend—who sometimes beat and kicked him but who had never failed him in the woods; and he knew, as he plunged in and started swimming towards the log where the ibis

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 stood, that this all-powerful master would watch over him from the bank and would hurl swift leaden death at any foe that attacked him on the way.

Marston, watching from his oak stump, saw it all and found in it confirmation of his suspicion that Cam was drunk. He glanced quickly towards the spot where, until that first shot rang out, the three great saurians had been basking at the surface of the water. Two of them had vanished altogether; but close to the place where they had been lying he saw two dark knobs, which might have been the blunt ends of waterlogged sticks, projecting an inch or so above the water and in front of them another knob. Presently all three of these knobs began to move, slowly at first, then, faster, yet hardly fast enough to disturb the placid surface of the lagoon.

Red Cam could not see them from where he stood, for the 'gator was behind and beyond the point of the willow-bordered peninsula, moving in a direction which would enable him to cut off the dog's retreat. And for some minutes black Brutus did not see them because they were approaching him from the flank and his eyes were fixed upon his goal. Then, at last, when he had covered nearly two-thirds of the distance to the cypress log where the wounded ibis stood, the dog, swerving aside to

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 avoid a clump of lily-pads, awoke to his danger.

Panic, born of instinct inherited from a long line of woods-ranging forbears, swept over him like a wave. Had he held his straight course, he might have gained the little island of the cypress log, but his one thought was to get back to his master. The little old man heard his mad yelps of terror and saw him turn and strike out for the willow dyke. A gallant fight black Brutus made, swimming as he had never swum before, his small jet head jerking convulsively as he cried out to the master who had never failed him yet.

But from the beginning the odds were heavily against him. Those periscope eyes with the larger protruding nostril-knob in front were now sliding through the water at a rate exceeding the speed of the dog; and whereas black Brutus was swimming around the are of a wide half-circle, the 'gator was cutting straight across in a course which would intersect the are and which was bringing him each moment yards nearer to his prey. And the dog could not maintain the heart-breaking pace which he had set. Always the 'gator's speed was increasing while the dog's was diminishing. In his frenzy of terror black Brutus's strength seemed to have gone out of him—or else he was spending his strength with his breath in those shrill pitiful cries for help which went ringing and echoing along the

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 cypress-walled margins and the moss-hung colonnades of the lagoon.

Red Cam, his brain awhirl, his sight dimming as the liquor took firmer grip upon him, nevertheless heard and understood. In a moment Marston saw him staggering along the dyke, breaking his way through the willows, shading his eyes with his hand as he peered out over the water. Drunk or sober, he could hardly fail to see the 'gator now, for not more than forty feet from the dog the great saurian came surging straight through a little floating island of lily-pads in his path, his grim head and fully eight feet of his jagged twelve-foot length visible above the surface.

Fascinated, Marston watched the drama, wondering why Cam did not shoot. Amazed, he saw Cam drop his gun and make his way precariously along a huge floating pine log projecting at right angles to the bank. Clear to the end of the long log he staggered, keeping his body upright by some miracle, and there for a moment he stood, shouting and waving his arms. Then, writhing and twisting in a vain effort to regain his balance, he pitched headlong into the dark water.

When, after a space of minutes the little old man looked again for the small jet head in the place where he had last seen it, black Brutus's race for life had ended.

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 John Marston had charged at Chancellorsville and had endured the horrors of the last days before Appomattox. Despite his poet's soul and his gentleness, there was granite in him. He knew that Red Cam was dead. The coolest, clearest-headed man, enmeshed in the tough, clinging, tangled water-growths which spread their tentacles everywhere through the deep, still water into which Cam had fallen, could hardly have saved himself. It was death sudden and horrible, but the little old man was sensible of no thrill of horror. This was the justice of the wild. It was the woods god's vengeance. A ruthless foe of the woods creatures, a killer who killed in utter wantonness, would kill no more.

It would matter little to Cam Reppington if all that was mortal of him remained where it was for the present. Later Marston would walk to the nearest plantation house and bring back some negroes to get the body out. Just now he had a more pressing task before him.

A quarter of a mile away, safely hidden amid the reeds in a sequestered cove of the lagoon, was a small, flat-bottomed punt of which he made frequent use on his visits to the egret city. Presently he paddled in this punt close to the little island of the cypress log where Sanute the ibis, too wise to venture into those alligator-haunted waters, still

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 waited, watching him suspiciously as he drew near.

"Well, old chief," said the little old man, "you're coming to live with me for a while. Maybe I can fix that wing or maybe you'll have to live with me always."

With a slow, soundless stroke of the paddle, he drove the punt a little nearer the log, ready to start in swift pursuit if the crippled bird took to the water.

"A close call, Sanute," he muttered, "a deucedly close call. But I said it and I was right. Red Cam the Killer will never lift your scalp."

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HEN Fergus Gilyan came up through the virgin wilderness to the rolling country within sight of the Blue Mountains, he did not place his cabin on any of the wooded knolls that he might have chosen. Instead, he made a small clearing in a dense canebrake bordering a creek and built his little log house there in the heart of the canes.

Some say he did this for safety's sake. The Muskogees were making war talks at the time, and a house on a height would have been a temptation to roving bands raiding the Overhills, as the mountain Cherokees called their high domain of purple peaks and ranges. But there was another reason besides this one.

Gilyan was a born hunter, and the canebrake, extending for miles along the stream, was alive with game. Around his cabin on every side the smooth straight stems towered thirty feet or more, an evergreen jungle walling in his tiny clearing, a jungle so dense that he could penetrate it only by following the winding trails made by the buffalo and the deer. These trails were his highways to the outside

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 world. From his cabin door to the creek he cut a straight wide path through the canes. There was scarcely an hour from dawn to dusk when, sitting in his doorway, he could not see some wild animal moving up or down the creek bed across that path.

One May afternoon, when he was sitting there smoking, he saw a sight more strange. He saw a small Indian boy, a slim naked youngster of perhaps ten years, back slowly down the creek bed and, still walking backward, turn into the path. Gilyan's right hand reached swiftly for the loaded rifle leaning against the wall just inside the door. In the half-light under the over-arching canes there was something deeply uncanny about that backward-walking Indian; but in a moment Gilyan had the answer to the riddle.

A long, gaunt, yellow-brown beast followed the boy; a big she-puma or panther, wild-eyed with hunger. At a glance Gilyan knew all that he needed to know. The puma's lower jaw had been broken. Some strange mischance—probably a blow from a wild horse's hoof—had shattered it and twisted it awry, so that it hung useless and crooked. The beast had starved for days, perhaps for weeks, and now famine had maddened her.

Yet her madness had not wholly conquered her fear of man. Grimly she dogged the boy's footsteps, but because he kept his face turned to her,

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 she had not yet leaped upon him. Plainly, however, she had now nerved herself for the onset. Gilyan knew that in another instant she would hurl herself upon her victim.

Gilyan did not rise from his stool. He flung the long heavy rifle to his shoulder, glanced for a fraction of a second along its steady barrel. The bullet passed not six inches from the young Indian and struck the puma midway between the eyes.

Gilyan was on his feet before she had struck ground. At top speed he raced down the path past the Indian boy and the dead puma to the point where the path met the creek. There he halted and gazed eagerly up and down the sandy bed of the stream hedged in by the tall, dense canes.

He saw nothing, but he knew that his eyes had not tricked him. He knew that at the moment when he had pulled trigger he had glimpsed along his rifle barrel another face besides the one at which he aimed—a wide, flat, tawny face in the midst of which gleamed a round white spot like a gigantic eye. For an instant this face had glared at him from the end of the path close beside the creek. Then, at the crack of the rifle, the face had vanished.

Gilyan was a clean man in those days. The raw poisonous taffai rum of the traders had not blurred his eye or his brain. The face that he had seen was

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 no phantasm, yet he had never seen such a face before. He searched the sands of the creek margin and found certain tracks there in addition to the tracks of the she-puma which he had killed. He studied them carefully; then, sure of his woodcraft, announced his conclusions in a guttural whisper, talking to himself, as was his habit.

"Ay," he muttered, "a big he-cub, bigger than the old she and not yet full grown; a big he-cub with a white spot on his forehead. Some day I'll stretch his hide."

Then he turned and walked back along the path towards the slender, copper-colored lad awaiting him beside the she-puma's body.

This was the beginning of two things. It was the beginning of Fergus Gilyan's knowledge of Koe Ishto (as he was afterwards known), the puma of Unaka Kanoos; and it was the beginning of the long friendship, if such it could be termed, between Gilyan, the first white man to settle on Gilyan's Creek at the foot of the Blue Mountains, and Corane the Raven, a war captain of the mountain Cherokees.

The Indian boy whose life Gilyan saved was Corane's son. Corane the Raven was no friend of the whites, for long ago, at a time when trouble threatened, they had captured him by trickery and

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 had held him as a hostage until the war drums no longer throbbed in the Overhills. But if the Raven never forgot that injury, neither could he forget what Gilyan had done. Thenceforward he was the white hunter's pledged brother.

There was one other who did not forget.

The big he-cub whose face Gilyan had glimpsed along his rifle barrel that May afternoon in the canebrake learned, that afternoon, a lesson which struck deep. Crouching behind the creek bank where the path came down to the stream, he saw his mother meet her end. He saw, too, in that same moment, a man leap from the doorway of the cabin in the clearing—a tall, stoop-shouldered man clad in buckskin and wearing a coonskin cap. In an instant the cub was gone, a lithe yellow-brown shape speeding in long bounds up the creek bed, hidden from the man's view by the canes.

Thus at the very outset of his independent career—for until then he had hunted with his mother and accepted her guidance—Koe Ishto, the puma of Unaka Kanoos, learned the deadly power of the tall buckskin-clad woodsman with whom, through no desire of his own, he was to wage a long war of craft and cunning. The experience amazed and terrified him. The young puma ran half a mile, a great distance for one of his short-winded race, before he halted; and even then his halt was only

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 temporary. Traveling all the rest of the day and most of the night, he pushed steadily northward through the vast, virgin forest until, almost suddenly, the rolling hills became mountains. The high, humped bulk of Unaka Kanoos stood well behind the first ridges of the mountain bulwark. Not until he was back on the peak where he had been born—the peak which had always been his home until, in an evil moment, his mother had led him down into the foothills—would the big cub feel that he was safe.

Even into that lofty fastness fate followed him swiftly. Within a month after his return to Unaka he heard for the second time in his life the crack of a rifle. He fled from it, yet it seemed to pursue him, for two hours later he heard it again. An hour before sunset he ventured down to the lower slopes in search of game. He was stalking a young buck grazing a little apart from its fellows in a grassy flat under gigantic beech trees when a crashing roar deafened his ears and a fierce burning pain stabbed his right hind leg.

The wound was a slight one. It healed in less than a week. But the terror of that moment was stamped indelibly upon his consciousness; and even in his panic he recognized the man who had wounded him—a tall, stoop-shouldered, buckskin-clad man in a coonskin cap, the man who had

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 leaped from the door of the cabin in the canebrake.

Already in Koe Ishto's brain this man stood for Fear; but it was in the beech wood on the lower slopes of Unaka Kanoos that the long war between Koe Ishto and Fergus Gilyan had its real beginning. Gilyan had come to Unaka in search of deer hides. Corane the Raven, whose village lay close to that mountain, had told him of the droves of whitetails to be found there, and he had come to see for himself. To his astonishment, he had chanced suddenly upon a puma which he recognized at once. It was an easy shot; yet, inexplicably, Gilyan had failed to kill.

The incident provoked him, whetted his determination. Having shot as many deer as he could skin, he spent two days searching for the puma on the rocky upper heights of Unaka, and when, early the following spring, he returned to the mountain for another deer hunt, he searched the upper heights again. His quest was fruitless, but he found puma tracks larger than any that he had ever seen before.

He was satisfied then that the big cub, now grown to adult estate and a veritable giant of his kind, lived always on Unaka Kanoos; and again Gilyan swore—despite certain things that Corane the Raven had made known to him

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 that soon or late he would stretch the huge cat's hide.

What the Raven had told him was this: that among certain clans or tribes of the red men the puma was held sacred and that this puma of Unaka Kanoos had become to the people of the Raven's clan more sacred than any other of his race. Klandaghi was the Cherokee name for the puma kind, an honorable name, worthy of the big lion-like cats of the forest who were the greatest of all the wild hunters. But to the puma of Unaka Kanoos an even loftier title had been given—Koe Ishto—and to all the warriors and hunters he was known as the Cat of God.

There were several reasons, Corane explained, for the bestowal of this honor. Not only did Koe Ishto make his home on one of the mountains which the Cherokees held in special reverence, that huge, humped, granite peak which was the throne and couch of the Red Spirit whose voice was the thunder. He was, too, in his own might and bulk such a puma as no living hunter of the Overhills had ever seen before.

Nor was this all. There was yet another thing which set him apart. He bore upon his flat forehead just above the eyes a round white spot as big as a wild turkey's egg. Against the dark background of his upper face, this white spot stood out so

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 vividly that it was visible a long bowshot away. Not even the oldest hunter of the Cherokees had seen or heard of another puma bearing a mark like this upon its face. Hence none doubted the conjurers and the shamans when they said that this white spot on Koe Ishto's forehead was the mark of that Red Spirit who ranked first among the tribesmen's gods because he was the most ruthless of them all.

To all this, as Corane the Raven told it, Gilyan listened gravely. Yet there was mockery in his heart and deceit upon his lips. The very things that made Koe Ishto sacred to the Cherokee hunters rendered Gilyan all the more desirous of securing the puma's pelt.

Koe Ishto's great size and the white spot on his forehead, which Gilyan had seen for the first time on that May afternoon in the canebrake, distinguished him from all other pumas or panthers, as the early frontiersmen called the great forest cats, and would greatly enhance the value of his skin.

Moreover, Gilyan shared in full measure the typical frontier hunter's inordinate pride in his own woodcraft; and this pride had been ruffled and pricked. Outwardly he seemed to respect the Raven's wishes; but on each of his deer-hunting trips to Unaka he devoted at least two days to a

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 search for the white-spotted puma and tried diligently to find his lair.

Season after season Gilyan searched in vain. At last, although he did not abandon his efforts altogether, he forced himself to admit that only by enlisting the Raven's aid could he succeed. This, difficult though it seemed, might not be impossible, for the Raven was bound by the traditions of his tribe to do the will of the man to whom he owed a great debt, the man whom he had made his pledged brother.

Gilyan, confident that his opportunity would come, realized that he must not force the issue. Craftily he bided his time.

Sir Alexander Twining, Special Commissioner of His Majesty King George II to the powerful Cherokee nation whose domain was the Blue Mountains, found much to interest him in Charles Town when he landed there from the high-pooped ship which had brought him from London. Yet to Sir Alexander, a sportsman before he became a diplomat, Charles Town was only a gateway to the mysterious, alluring wilderness which lay beyond.

The preparations for his journey to the Overhills were quickly made. In early spring his caravan set out—himself and his periwigged secretary; four lean, lynx-eyed hunters selected by the Governor

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 of Carolina and headed by Fergus Gilyan of Gilyan's Creek, somewhat the worse for rum now that he was nearing fifty, but still one of the best woodsmen in the province; a half-dozen packhorse men and negro grooms; Conerton, the ex-trader, to act as interpreter; and five tall Cherokee warriors sent down by Moytoy of Tellequo, greatest of the chiefs, to make sure that no war party of the Choctaw or the Muskogee lurked beside the trail. Corane the Raven, one of Moytoy's war captains, commanded the Indian escort.

Of him the King's Commissioner saw but little as the cavalcade rode league after league along the narrow trail winding through the endless primeval forest. The Raven, as always distrustful of the Charles Town English, held himself aloof. As a tule, he rode with two of his braves well in advance of the column, his spear held in his right hand, his long bow slung across his broad, bare shoulders; and from the first Sir Alexander's keen eye marked the careless grace of his horsemanship, the feline litheness and strength of his tall, powerful form.

Twining, for all his airs and frills, a good judge of men, sought closer acquaintance with this war captain of Moytoy, the great chief, whom he was presently to meet in conference, but found the task discouraging. The Raven, always respectful,

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 wrapped himself in frigid dignity which effectually rebuffed the Commissioner's advances and soon strained his good humor to the breaking point. At last, flushed with anger, Sir Alexander reined in his horse.

"Faith, Gilyan!" he exclaimed, as the main body of the caravan came up, "the man's a lump! There's no sense or courtesy in him. You say he understands our English speech, but if so he has forgot how to wag his tongue. I give no thanks to the Cherokee king for sending so unmannerly a minion to escort me to his kingdom!"

Fergus Gilyan, who had watched the play with grim amusement, smiled.

"Corane the Raven is no friend to the English, Sir Alexander," he said slowly. "He is longerheaded than most of his breed and he knows what the coming of the white man means to his people. He does not favor this treaty which you will offer the Cherokee chiefs. If he could have his way, there would be war, not peace."

Twining ripped out an oath.

"I guessed as much," he said. "We had best watch him, then, lest he lead us into some ambush. D'ye think Moytoy plans treachery?"

Gilyan shook his head.

"No fear," he replied. "Gifts and flattery from Charles Town have blinded Moytoy's eyes. He has

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 been won by your plan to make him emperor of all the Cherokee tribes. Corane will obey Moytoy's commands."

Sir Alexander pursed his lips and muttered in his curled and scented brown beard, yet quickly forgot his fears. Soon the sights and sounds of the springtime wilderness drove weightier matters from his mind. To his English eyes this trail through the teeming virgin forest was an avenue of innumerable wonders; and always, as he rode, he carried in his right hand the long rifle which he had procured in Charles Town and with which, thanks to Gilyan's teaching, he was already fairly proficient.

Again and again he tried his marksmanship. Now his target was a platoon of tall gray cranes, standing like soldiers on parade in a flower-sprinkled savannah beside the trail. Now he brought down, amid the plaudits of his comrades, a great wild turkey cock which Gilyan had pointed out to him as it perched in fancied security on a high limb of a giant pine. A half-dozen times he wasted powder and shot on flocks of green and yellow parrakeets which at frequent intervals flew screeching overhead; and once he rode a quarter of a mile along a sun-dappled forest vista towards a herd of twenty whitetails resting under the trees and, starting a small black wolf from its bed in a bunch of broom grass, killed

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 it with a lucky shot as it dashed towards the cover of a wild rose thicket.

"What say you now, Gilyan?" he cried in high elation as he galloped back to his companions. "What say you now to my skill? Am I good enough yet, d'ye think, to hunt your great tawny cat of the sacred mountain—that Koe Ishto of the white spotted face whose hide you have promised me when we reach the Overhills?"

It was the time of the midday halt for rest and food. Most of the party had dismounted and were standing around the fire, where the turkey cock which Sir Alexander had killed was roasting, together with several haunches of venison brought in by Gilyan's hunters. Corane the Raven still sat his wiry Chicasaw pony a little apart from the others, but he was near enough to hear Sir Alexander's words.

For a fraction of a second his brows contracted; and Gilyan, watching the Indian keenly, saw that fleeting shadow of a frown. The white hunter laughed carelessly as he answered Sir Alexander's question.

"Koe Ishto is wise," he said, "the greatest and wisest of his kind. I have promised you that we shall hunt him when we camp under the Blue Mountains because you wish a panther skin for your lady. But as for promising you his hide, there is only one

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 man here present who could make you that promise."

King George's Commissioner had dismounted while Gilyan was speaking. He turned towards the hunter, his silver snuff box delicately balanced in his left hand.

"And that man?" he asked eagerly.

Gilyan nodded towards the tall Indian sitting erect and impassive on his claybank pony.

"Corane's town lies in the valley in the shadow of Koe Ishto's mountain. Corane knows Koe Ishto's ways and can lead us to his lair. Corane the Raven must hunt with us or we shall fail."

For a moment Twining hesitated. Then, swallowing his pride, he turned with an engaging smile to Moytoy's war captain.

"What say you, my brother?" he asked suavely. "Wilt lead us to the den of the great cat of the mountain—this Koe Ishto of the spotted face, concerning whom Gilyan has told me many tales?"

For a long half-minute Corane the Raven, gazing straight ahead of him, his clear cut countenance as stern as that of a bronze image, remained silent. Twining's brows drew together in a frown; the blood mounted to his pale, handsome face. At last the Indian turned his head slowly and looked at Gilyan—a look which seemed at once to convey a challenge and ask a question.

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 The white hunter nodded; then, frowning slightly, lowered his eyes. The Raven, addressing himself to Twining, spoke gravely in his own tongue.

"Corane will lead you to Koe Ishto's cave," he said.

While Conerton, the interpreter, was whispering to Sir Alexander the meaning of the words, the Indian wheeled his horse and rode slowly forward along the trail.

A Cherokee woman, pounding corn beside the shallow rock-strewn river which flowed through the Raven's village, glanced up at the huge humped mountain towering above the Indian town.

"See," she said to the little naked girl squatting beside her, "the Thunder God sleeps. He has drawn his robe over him so that the noonday sun will not shine on his face."

A fleecy cloud hid the upper half of Unaka Kanoos. Only the heavily wooded lower slopes of the mountain were visible, their deep, lustrous green appearing almost black in contrast with the brilliant whiteness of the cloud-curtain veiling the rocky crest. Three miles to the eastward, on a ridge across the valley, Corane the Raven noted with troubled eyes the blanket of dense vapor hiding the summit and half the bulk of Unaka. To him also this meant

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 that the Spirit was at home on his chosen mountain and was taking his ease there, having first thrown a coverlet of cloud over his couch so that he might not be seen by mortal eyes.

Yet the Raven spoke no word, did not slacken his pace. Fergus Gilyan, spare, wiry, endowed with sinews of steel, strode briskly close behind the tall Indian. But King George's Commissioner, puffing and blowing as the slope grew steeper, prayed silently for a halt, yet was too plucky to confess his plight.

It was already mid-afternoon. Sir Alexander's caravan had encamped in the foothills the evening before. After a long ride over the first rampart of the Blue Ridge, with but one halt by the high falls of the Whitewater, the Raven and his two companions had left their ponies at the foot of Unaka Kanoos and had at once begun the ascent.

Gilyan noted with silent approval the Raven's plans for the hunt. He knew that, unlike most pumas, Koe Ishto helped his mate kill meat for her little ones and kept watch over the cave which was their home. Evidently the Raven would waste no time seeking his quarry along the runways of the deer or in the bushy meadows where the whitetails grazed. Instead, he would go straight to the cave where the puma had his lair, the cave for which Gilyan had so often searched in vain. The white

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 hunter smiled with satisfaction and his lean brown fingers tightened their grip on the butt of the long rifle cocked across his shoulder.

None of the three, not even Corane the Raven, knew that as they skirted a rhododendron thicket fringing a precipitous brook, pale yellow eyes surmounted by a round white spot as big as a wild turkey's egg had gazed upon them coldly from the thicket's recesses. None of them knew that when they had passed on up the slope, a long, sinuous, tawny shape emerged from the rhododendrons and followed in their footsteps, gliding as silently as a ghost amid the massive gray trunks of the burly oaks and the towering tulip trees.

The fear in those pale eyes was stronger than the anger which was in them also. Koe Ishto had learned long since that the Raven was not his foe. But now the Raven was not alone. With him marched two white hunters; and in one of these two Koe Ishto recognized at once his most implacable enemy, the tall, stoop-shouldered, buckskin-clad white man who had wounded him long ago and who camped from time to time on the lower slopes of Unaka Kanoos and ranged widely over the rocky heights as well as the timbered valleys. The big—puma feared the tall woodsman in the buckskin shirt and coonskin cap wherever he found him; but when Gilyan ranged high on Unaka or followed some trail

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 which would take him to the mountain's summit, the fear in Koe Ishto's eyes became an agony of terror.

This terror clutched him now. Never before had the thing which he dreaded most seemed so imminent. Early that spring torrential rains had drenched Unaka Kanoos. Through some obscure cranny water had found its way into the high cave which Koe Ishto and his mate had used for years. Hating moisture, like all the cat tribe, the mother puma had removed the cubs to another cave, dryer but in other respects much less secure, a cave situated some distance farther down the mountain.

The move had scarcely been made when disaster befell, a mischance so strange as to be almost incredible. Salali the Squirrel, the chief conjurer of the Raven's town, had climbed to the top of Unaka Kanoos to gather certain roots and herbs which grew above the clouds. At the edge of the huge precipice near the mountain's summit the conjurer stood in rapture, shaking like a man with fever, chanting the praises of the Thunder God. Then, when the frenzy had passed, an idle impulse moved him to pick up a heavy rounded stone, as big as a man's head, and hurl it into the abyss.

The stone fell into the tree-tops far below and bounded on and on down the steep slope. No trunk of oak or poplar arrested its progress. Instead, it crashed like a cannon ball into the ribs of Koe

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 Ishto's mate lying asleep in a shady spot near the cave where soft, fernlike mosses covered the ground. Ten minutes later the life passed out of her, and Koe Ishto, returning to the cave towards evening, found her lying bloody and stiff upon the moss.

The cubs no longer needed their mother's milk. They were old enough now to subsist entirely upon meat, and Koe Ishto easily supplied their wants. He had been hunting deer for them in the deep woods of the lower slopes when he chanced upon the Raven and his companions making their way along a trail leading to the summit, a trail which passed within a hundred yards of the cubs' new home. At once he had forgotten the deer and had shadowed the hunters as they pushed upward through the forest; and now, when the cubs' den lay not half a mile distant, the fear which had gripped him the moment he recognized Fergus Gilyan had mounted and sharpened and swelled until he was conscious of nothing else.

Sir Alexander Twining was a proud man and sound of wind and limb. But he had never before climbed mountains and at last his extremity got the better of his pride. He whispered to Gilyan that he could go no farther, and when Gilyan had informed the Raven of the fact the tall Indian stood for a moment in thought. Koe Ishto's lair, he told

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 the white hunter presently, still lay far ahead and above, near the summit of Unaka; but there was a spot near at hand where they might rest and spend the night in comfort, then push on towards their goal before dawn.

King George's Commissioner, flat on his back in the shade, gave a great sigh of relief when this news was imparted to him. He was too weary to move, and his heart was pounding like a hammer. They would remain where they were, he proposed, until the sun sank lower, then seek their sleeping place. The view from the spot where he lay entranced him; and the crimson and gold of a mountain sunset, painting the billowy clouds and bathing all the wooded peaks and valleys in magic light, held him there until dusk had fallen. Hence it was black night when the Raven, turning aside from the trail, led the way through the deep woods around a shoulder of the mountain to the place where they would find shelter.

A narrow ledge traversed the face of a great rockmass at the head of a small ravine. Presently the ledge widened, forming a broad, level shelf; and behind this shelf a long, horizontal cleft, ten feet high at the entrance, struck deep into the rock. Kindling a fire, they roasted two ruffed grouse which the Raven had brought down with light cane arrows on the way up the mountain. Then the King's

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 Commissioner lay down on a bed of odorous hemlock boughs.

Already the night chill had descended. Sir Alexander placed his couch well within the cave where he would escape the dew. Geilyan chose to sleep in the open on the broad shelf directly in front of the cave's entrance, where the branches of a great chestnut oak, springing from the base of the rock, spread themselves ten feet above him like a canopy. Long before the fire flickered out these two were sleeping soundly.

Corane the Raven, stretched at full length on the bare rock five yards to Gilyan's left, knew that for him there would be no sleep that night. For an hour or more he lay motionless, his eyes closed; but all that while his brain was in turmoil—a turmoil of anger, none the less deep because it was sternly repressed, and sorrow and foreboding.

He was grateful for the respite which Sir Alexander's fatigue had brought. But for Twining's temporary collapse, they would have reached that afternoon the high cave which had been Koe Ishto's den for years. He had planned to station Twining and Gilyan in an ambush near the path which the parent pumas used in passing to and from the den; and probably before nightfall a rifle would have cracked and Koe Ishto's life would have ended. But the respite, after all, meant little. It merely post

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 poned for a short time the sacrilege for which the Red Spirit of Unaka Kanoos would assuredly seek vengeance.

What would that vengeance be? What punishment would be visited upon him because through his connivance the Cat of God had been killed? The Raven did not know. But he was very sure that punishment would come, that it was unescapable. He had no choice, it seemed, save to do what he was doing, for such was the law—the inviolable law which commanded loyalty to a pledged brother. But his heart blazed with hatred of the man who, taking advantage of that law, had forced this course upon him. And presently, little by little, like a specter dreadful yet somehow welcome, a grim question pushed its way to the threshold of his brain.

Was there a way out, after all, a way which the gods might approve or at least excuse? It was true that on that May afternoon long ago in the canebrake in the foothills he had given to Gilyan the pledge of lifelong brotherhood. It was true that his debt to the man who had saved his son's life was a debt so deep that it could never be forgotten. But it was true also that Gilyan had proved himself an enemy to the people of the Overhills, the people of Corane's race.

The white traders, coming up from Charles Town, brought rum to the Blue Mountains, that strong

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24 the alphabet upwards. They were taught reading, writing, spelling, grammar, and arithmetic, and the plan on which the duties of the school were conducted was nearly similar to that of an English school. In order to afford sufficient time for the boys to acquire a considerable knowledge of Bengalee before they began to learn English, no pupil was admitted into the school above eight years of age. The scholars were promoted to the Society's English School or to the as a reward for their proficiency in Bengalee, the study of which they were required to continue until they acquired a competent knowledge of the language. This attention to the cultivation of the language of the country, the chief medium through which instruction can be conveyed to the people, was a highly gratifying feature in the operations of this Society; and an additional advantage of the school at Arpuly was the example which it afforded to the whole of the indigenous schools. The best proof of the estimation in which it was held by the Native inhabitants of the neighborhood, was the frequent earnest solicitation received from the most respectable Natives to have their children educated in it.

It is deeply to be regretted that the operations of a Society, conducted with so much judgment and success, should be thus cripped and curtailed.

The Calcutta Diocesan Committee of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts has several elementary schools in the neighborhood of Calcutta. The following is a synopsis of their number, and of the average daily attendance at each, extracted from the last report (1834.)


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 maddening drink known as taffai, which already had all but ruined the tribes of the lower country. From his cabin in the foothills Gilyan had introduced rum to the Cherokees. For a keg of taffai many deerskins might be had. Stealing away the red hunters' brains with his liquor, Gilyan year after year had robbed them of their pelts. Nor was this the worst. In his long pursuit of Koe Ishto, the puma of Unaka Kanoos, Gilyan had flouted the Cherokees' beliefs and had insulted their gods; and now, to curry favor with this powerful white chief who had come from beyond the Great Water, he was making the Raven himself a traitor to his own faith and exposing him to the Red God's wrath.

Suddenly there leaped full-formed into the Raven's brain a new thought. What if the vengeance which would surely come were visited not upon him alone but upon all his people? What if the Red Spirit who dwelt upon Unaka Kanoos should punish Corane's nation for Corane's crime?

The question was no sooner framed in his mind than it was answered. In a flash he knew that he had made the wrong decision, that of two evils he had chosen not the lesser but the greater. Upon him alone would rest the responsibility if he broke that law which commanded loyalty to a pledged brother, that law which required him to do as Gilyan asked. But not to him alone would punish-

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 ment be meted out if, through his treachery, Koe Ishto of Unaka Kanoos were killed. Always the shamans and the conjurers had pictured the Red Master of the Thunders as that most ruthless and most potent god who held all the people of the Overhills in the hollow of his hand, and who, if he were offended, might in an instant destroy them all.

Into the Raven's heart swept such fear as he had never known before: such fear as a man must feel who opens his eyes suddenly to find himself standing on the brink of a bottomless pit into which he had been about to plunge unawares. And after the fear followed horror of the thing that must now be done; and after the horror came something that was like a terrible, fierce joy.

He had loved Gilyan. Many times in years gone by they had roamed the woods together. But those years had passed, and long ago his love for Gilyan had died. Since then there was a heavy score to settle; and now the time for settling it had come.

It was Gilyan's life or Koe Ishto's. The Raven could not, by simply withdrawing from the hunt, undo what he had done. Gilyan now knew too definitely the general location of Koe Ishto's lair. He could find it without further aid, and that he would find it sooner or later was certain. The Raven knew that there was only one way in which he

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 could atone, only one way in which he could save his people from the calamity which he had all but brought upon them. And with that long score to settle he was glad that there was only one way.

For many minutes he did not move. He lay on his back, his eyes open now, listening to Gilyan's slow, heavy breathing, planning carefully the thing that he was about to do. At last his hand groped along the rocky surface to his left and closed upon the long knife which he had placed within easy reach beside his bow and his spear.

There would be no outcry. The King's Commissioner would awake at dawn to find a dead man lying at the entrance of the cave; and by that time the Raven would be far on his way towards the unknown wilderness beyond the headwaters of Ocona Lufta, where no white man had ever trod.

Still lying on his back, he turned his head very slowly to the right.

For some moments he was not sure of what he saw. The fire had died away to nothing. Overhead a few stars glittered. A half moon shone feebly through a thin veil of cloud. In the faint light even the Indian warrior's trained vision failed to discern the outline of the puma's form. Yet something about the shape of the stout chestnut oak limb slanting above the wide ledge in front of the

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 cave fixed his attention. Instinctively he studied it; and all at once he knew that Koe Ishto crouched on the limb ten feet above the spot where Gilyan lay.

Amazement held him motionless, but even in his amazement he understood. Instantly he realized that only one thing could have brought Koe Ishto to that place, that only one thing could have nerved him to mount the chestnut oak at the base of the cliff and take his stand on the limb above the ledge where the hunter was sleeping. Koe Ishto had changed his lair. He had abandoned the high cave near Unaka's summit and had brought his cubs to this other cave which he had never utilized before. The Raven knew that somewhere in the black recesses of that deep slit in the rock the cubs were hiding.

In an instant his plan was formed. It came to him suddenly, complete and perfect, as though some voice had whispered it in his ear. His right hand laid down the knife, groped cautiously for a moment, closed upon the slim, straight shaft of his spear. Very slowly, so slowly that the movement was almost imperceptible, he turned over and began to crawl inch by inch across the ledge towards the cave's entrance.

Always as he crawled he watched the vague bulk of Koe Ishto on the great oak limb almost directly over Gilyan's head. He saw the long body of the

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 puma tremble and stiffen, and immediately he halted and for perhaps five minutes remained motionless. Even more slowly than before, he crept forward again, until he vanished in the obscurity of the cave.

For some minutes there was no sound except the slow breathing of the two sleeping men. Then a shrill, piercing scream split the silence; the scream of a puma cub in fear or pain; a puma cub which had felt the prick of the Raven's spear.

At once Gilyan—a light sleeper, like all wilderness hunters—awoke and sat bolt upright. And at once a long, dark shape, dim, shadowy, incredibly huge, launched itself from the oak limb above and fell full upon him, smashing him down upon the rock.

He uttered no sound. His neck was broken; probably his skull was crushed. Koe Ishto, growling savagely, crouched upon the body, his long tail twitching to and fro, his eyes shining like huge emeralds lit with yellow fire. Sir Alexander Twining, awakened by harsh, shuddering growls which seemed to shake the air within the cave, raised himself on his elbow. He saw those eyes and the vague, dreadful bulk behind them, and gave himself up for lost.

Suddenly from the blackness of the cave Corane the Raven strode forward, his spear leveled. For

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 an interminable minute puma and Indian faced each other; and as the slow seconds passed the Raven knew that behind the emerald eyes, burning like live coals in the darkness, fury and fear were struggling for the mastery.

He could almost read in the changing glare of those eyes the progress of the struggle; and from the beginning he had little doubt as to the outcome. For one reckless moment, as the scream of his cub rang in his ears, Koe Ishto's fury had triumphed. In the madness of that moment he had hurled himself upon his nearest enemy. So much the Raven had foreseen and expected confidently; but, knowing the puma kind, he believed that this would be the end.

For as much as a minute he waited motionless, his right hand gripping the leveled spear, ready for what might happen. Then slowly he raised his left hand above his head in the gesture of peace and farewell. Next moment the burning eyes vanished and the ledge was empty except for the dead man lying twisted and limp.

It was the Indian who broke the silence. Standing at the cliff's edge, his tall, sinewy form superbly erect, his face lifted to the faint stars, he intoned in the Cherokee tongue a chant of praise to the Spirit of Unaka Kanoos, the Red God of the Thunders, Koe Ishto's master and lord, who had given the great

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 cat courage to serve the Raven's need. Then he turned to King George's Commissioner.

"Corane the Raven has fulfilled his promise," he said in English. "He has led the white chief to Koe Ishto, the Cat of God. When it is light he will lead the white chief back to the camp of his people."

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IVE hundred feet above the rocky summit of Devilhead Peak a black speck sailed slowly across the bright blue face of the sky. Dan Alexander, striding along a winding trail close to the foot of the mountain, saw that soaring speck and smiled grimly.

"You're out early, Cloud King," he muttered, "an' right now you're lookin' things over before you decide where you'll hunt. Better keep out o' my way, you bloody murderer, or your hunting'll come to a sudden end. Hello! What's up now?"

The young mountaineer, his rifle resting in the crook of his left elbow, halted and gazed upward. The black speck which was Cloud King no longer circled above the peak. Instead, it was shooting down with that appalling swiftness which distinguishes the peregrine falcon among all the sharptaloned hunters of the air. Wide-eyed and almost breathless, Dan watched that splendid plunge. Then with an exclamation he leaped upon a rock beside the trail whence he could look out over a small grass-grown wheat field in the bottom of the valley.

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 Straight toward the wheat field Cloud King, the peregrine, was falling. His long wings were half closed, so that his body had the shape of a spearhead—a spearhead rushing through space at such terrific speed that the keen eyes of the mountaineer could scarcely distinguish its form. Instantly Dan knew that in or above the wheat field Cloud King had spotted a victim, and in a moment he saw it—a ruffed grouse flying across the open only a few yards above the ground. The big bird had left an oak knoll some distance ahead of the woodsman and had taken a short cut across the field in order to reach the chestnut slope on the other side.

"You fool!" Dan whispered, talking to himself, as was his habit when there was no one else to talk to. "Don't you know"

He got no further, for at that moment a living thunderbolt coming from above and behind struck the grouse squarely upon the back and hurled it lifeless into the grass.

Dan, balancing his tall lean body on the rock beside the trail, watched the falcon shoot onward past the spot where his victim had fallen, swerve on stiffened wings and return with leisurely strokes to recover his prey. Low above the grass, he hovered for a moment on slowly beating pinions; and Dan was on the point of jumping down from the rock for a quick dash into the wheat field, when

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 something happened which brought an exclamation of astonishment from his lips.

From a thick tuft of weeds almost directly under the hovering hawk a slim reddish shape leaped into the air. Long pointed jaws snapped together within an inch of the falcon's body, and with a scream of anger Cloud King, the peregrine, shot forward and upward. Dan, craning his neck, could see plainly a big red fox trotting slowly through the sparse grass of the wheat field, the dead grouse hanging from his jaws.

For a moment amazement held the young woodsman motionless. Then a broad grin spread slowly across his thin, sun-tanned face. He watched the fox, which was well out of range, pass on across the field to the cover of the woods, while the falcon swooped and hovered overhead. Then he jumped lightly down from the rock and strode on along the trail.

So it happened that Dan Alexander, setting out one October morning on a hunt which had nothing to do with Cloud King, the peregrine of Devilhead, or with Red Rogue, the old dog fox that was Cloud King's neighbor, encountered these two old enemies of his at the very outset of his quest. Dan knew Cloud King and Red Rogue well—the Bachelors of Devilhead, he sometimes called them, because they lived mateless and alone. It was he who had named

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 them; for there was a romantic strain in the young mountaineer, developed by a year at college in the lowlands, which caused him to give titles of his own to those wild creatures of the mountain woods which were constantly crossing his path.

It was no feeling akin to affection, however, which had led him to study with special care the habits of the peregrine falcon and the old red fox which had their homes on the craggy summit of Devilhead Peak, looming high above his cabin. Long ago Dan had learned to look upon these two as his foes and rivals, destroyers of the game which he loved to hunt and which he regarded as his most precious possession. Again and again he had seen the evidences of their depredations, and for months he had waged an intermittent war against them. So far, however, they had thwarted all his stratagems and defied his woodcraft; and now, as he passed on along the trail, humming a tune under his breath, resentment gradually supplanted the amusement which the episode in the wheat field had inspired.

He had found delight in witnessing the discomfiture of Cloud King. That bold pirate of the airy spaces had been fooled for once; the game which he had killed had been taken away from him under his very nose. But while one of the brigands of Devilhead had thus been cheated, the other had profited. Red Rogue, the rascally fox that lived by

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 his wits, even as Cloud King lived by his matchless speed and indomitable courage, was at that very moment feasting upon a fat grouse—or pheasant, as Dan called it—which good luck and his own quick brain had procured for him. Dan grumbled impatiently at the thought and frowned darkly as he reviewed the little tragedy in the wheat field—a tragedy which was a sharp reminder that the two buccaneers of Devilhead were still waging destructive war on the game that he cherished as his own.

"I'll get them two vagabones," he muttered, "if it takes all winter. That's all they is to it. The confounded murderous varmints! Slaughterin' a pheasant right before my eyes!"

For a moment he was tempted to renew then and there his crusade against the marauders of Devilhead, climbing the peak and lying in ambush near the summit in the hope of getting a shot at the fox or the falcon when they returned to their homes in the great cliff just under the brow of the mountain. He had tried that method before, however, and found it fruitless, and he quickly abandoned the idea. Presently he dismissed the problem from his mind for the moment and focused his thoughts once more upon the object which had led him to take the trail that morning. On a wooded shoulder sloping down from Devilhead Peak a big wild gobbler had taken up his abode. It was in search of this gobbler

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 that Dan had started out with his rifle shortly after sunrise, and another half-hour would bring him to the spot where he hoped to find the turkey seeking his forenoon meal.

Some three hours later, on a saddle of a high ridge across the valley from Devilhead, a black-and-white pileated woodpecker, or logcock, hammering on a dead chestnut limb, suddenly ceased his labors. A movement far beneath him near the foot of his tree had caught his eye. Part of a large rock five or six yards from the base of the chestnut had come to life, had stirred slightly, had whisked itself away from the main mass of the rock and now lay motionless again in the rock's shadow.

The logcock observed that this thing which had moved had the exact shape of a fox's body—that it was, in fact, a fox. His curiosity aroused, the big woodpecker, almost as large as a small duck, hung motionless on his chestnut limb, watching eagerly, his long striped neck twisted sideways, his tall scarlet crest erect. He had failed to distinguish Red Rogue, the fox, taking a sun bath on the rock. Even if he had been aware that a fox was enjoying a nap fifty feet beneath him, he would not have been especially interested. But now that Red Rogue had moved, and moved so swiftly and energetically, the logcock felt that this fox was worth watching.

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 Presently he was aware of certain faint sounds frequently repeated and he knew at once that these sounds were the cause of the fox's sudden movement. Something was stirring in the dense kalmias clothing the steep side of the ridge just below the rock. What it was the logcock did not know; but he did know that the fox was listening to those sounds and that he found them interesting. The sounds were stealthy yet distinct, and they were drawing nearer. The intruder, whatever it was, was making its way up the side of the ridge straight for the rock behind which Red Rogue was crouching.

The logcock waited and watched, his whole attention centered upon the fox lying there in his ambush and upon those mysterious, slowly approaching sounds. Yet now and again as he waited his bright beady eyes darted swift glances out over the valley which he overlooked from his chestnut tree; and suddenly he saw something which drove all other matters from his mind.

Straight across the valley, coming from the direction of Devilhead Peak, a long-winged gray hawk was flying swiftly, heading directly toward the logcock's chestnut. The big woodpecker recognized the hawk at once as the peregrine falcon that had his aerie on Devilhead crag. For an instant the logcock glanced wildly about him. Then, as nimbly as a squirrel, he darted around the limb. His body

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