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 and the deep swamps of the Low Country, it was seldom now that any member of that race lived long enough to attain a length of twelve feet. Soon or late, buckshot or rifle bullet found a vital spot; and it was only the great cunning of the king of the river—and perhaps the good luck that had seemed to attend him from the start—that kept him safe for so long.

Man was now the only foe that he feared; but so intense was his fear of man that it was the ruling passion of his life, shaping and directing all his activities. The selection of his basking places on the shore and of his dens under the river banks and the old ricefield dams, his comings and goings, his hunting expeditions and forays—all these depended upon and were governed by the degree of mandanger involved. Yet now and again he hit back at his dreaded foeman. He became an adept at hog stealing, skillfully stalking the half-wild woods hogs where they came down to wallow in the mud, seizing them in his huge jaws or knocking them senseless with his powerful tail. Several times man had provided him with even choicer meat—small 'possum dogs and coon dogs from the negro cabins; and once a fine imported setter, ignorant of the dangers lurking in the Low Country waters in the warm season, found her way into his insatiable maw.

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 Again and again, in spite of his cunning, death all but had him. Once he was hooked—caught on a set line baited with a dead gallinule suspended six inches above the water with a big shark hook imbedded in its carcass. Fortunately for him, a section of old rope, with which the line had been pieced out, was too rotten to withstand his struggles. He was never hooked again—the one lesson was enough.

Gunners were more dangerous foes. He carried much lead in his body, some of it in his head, for he had been wounded at least a dozen times, and three of these wounds were serious; but the gator, though more vulnerable than is commonly supposed, is exceedingly tenacious of life, and the bigger he is the harder it is to kill him. Because, in common with all his kind, he slept all winter in a secret den extending far back under the river bank, the river king was out of harm's way during the greater part of the period when human hunters were numerous in his domain; for when once summer had come to the Low Country, not many white men cared to brave the almost intolerable heat of the fresh-water rivers and lagoons. A few negro fishermen were even then abroad, but he had learned that these were not so greatly to be feared. They seldom took their rusty single-barreled shotguns with them when they went fishing, and they were not often tempted to

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 waste their precious buckshot shells upon so difficult a target as a gator's eyes—two knobs, scarcely bigger than a pair of walnuts, projecting from the surface of the water some sixty or seventy yards away.

One afternoon in early April, when there was a sharper nip in the air than the king of the river liked, he passed through a gap in a ricefield bank and made his way along deep canals leading from the river to the landward edge of the ricefields. Presently, when he was sure that no man was near, he drew his huge body out upon the bank, which was merely a low dyke shaded by tall moss-bannered cypresses. Following a well-marked gator crawl, for many years a pathway for numberless saurians, he crossed this dike and entered the clear brown water of a long serpentine lagoon behind it. For half a mile he swam up the middle of this lagoon, only his eyes and nostrils visible. Swinging around a willow-covered point of land, he came into a hidden cove, secluded and still, surrounded on three sides by a dense growth of young cypresses in which perched many black-crowned night herons. At the end of the cove rose a high yet gently sloping bank facing the sun; and on this bank, basking in the warmth, lay six large alligators, ranging in size from eight to eleven feet, while from the water nearby pro-

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 truded the grotesque heads and the rough, rugged, black backs of ten or twelve other saurians.

The king of the river had not expected to find the cove so crowded. He had not foreseen that the same reason which brought him there—the fact that this high westward-facing bank was an especially fine basking place on this unusually chilly April afternoon—would attract many others of his kind also. His favorite spot was already occupied by a big ten-foot bull, but the latter hastily made way for the saurian monarch as he drew his vast bulk out upon the shore.

For an hour he lay motionless among his fellows, drowsy yet watchful, his broad flat head facing the water, his long, jagged, perpendicularly flattened tail curved behind him. Then a sharp crack shattered the heavy silence of the cove and the dark water all along the bank surged and heaved as six ponderous armored bodies slid down the slope and plunged beneath the surface.

The king of the river had not moved. Just behind his right eye a black-red spot appeared and slowly grew larger. Soon his cavernous jaws gaped widely, his huge plated head twisted a little to the left, his ridged tail writhed slowly back and forth. A shudder shook his giant frame. Then he lay still, while a dark rivulet of blood trickled down the bank toward the water.

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 A canoe, which had emerged from behind the point of willows far up the cove, came skimming across the glassy surface. The white man who sat in the bow, a rifle across his knees, had not yet recovered from his amazement, though he carefully concealed this fact from his negro paddler. He was not a Low Countryman, but an uplander who had come to the Low Country to fish for black bass, and it pleased him to pretend that he made astonishing shots like this as a matter of course. He leaped out of the canoe the moment its bow touched the bank and, disregarding the negro's word of caution, advanced toward his victim.

Luckily for him, he was just beyond the danger zone when the king of the river came to life. So swiftly that the man's eye could scarcely follow the sweep of the long tail, the great gator's massive body bent itself like a bow, then instantly straightened. The man leaped back and, jerking the rifle to his shoulder, fired into the heaving water where a colossal black bulk, catapulted outward from the bank by the powerful muscles of that mighty tail, had vanished as if by magic.

Fifty feet from the shore the king of the river came to the surface. Straight down the middle of the cove he rushed, his juggernaut head and eight feet of his armored rugged back showing above the water. Madness had him—madness that was some-

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 thing more than a frenzy of terror and pain. The bullet which had entered his skull and temporarily paralyzed his body seemed now to have paralyzed instinct also. To the right of him, to the left and ahead the water spouted in little jets as the rifle bullets struck, but the great saurian did not submerge. Like a submarine with half its deck awash, he raced on at full speed, while the night herons, startled by the fusillade, flapped and croaked above him.

A bullet ripped a furrow in the armor of his back, but even this did not send him down to the depths where he would have found safety. Yet, if the instinct that should have kept him under water was dead for a time, he seemed to know even in his madness where he was going. Sometimes a gator, suddenly recovering consciousness after an almost fatal shot, charges aimlessly about at the surface, swimming frantically in circles or even driving himself up on the bank. But the king of the river, in that wild race, somehow held a straight course. Halfway down the cove, another bullet seared his back; but when at last he reached the end of the cove and, turning into the main lagoon, swung broadside to the gunner, the range was too great for any save a master rifleman.

An osprey, circling above the lower reaches of the lagoon, saw a huge black shape go surging by

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 beneath him, sending out on either side long waves that rustled and whispered along the reedy margins. A gray fox, walking the cypress-shaded dike between the lagoon and the abandoned ricefields, quickened his pace as a saurian charged straight for the dike and, rearing his gigantic dripping body out of the water, waddled awkwardly yet with surprising speed along the gator crawl and into the deep canal beyond. A lithe snake-bodied mink, about to swim the canal near the gap where it emptied into the river, heard a sound as of a swiftly moving boat, and, hiding amid the reeds, watched the river king race past along the narrow waterway.

In the river tide was ebbing. The wounded saurian, still swimming with frenzied energy, swung downstream with the current. The setting sun turned the rippling water to bronze, which changed to silver when the moon came up above the forest on the eastern bank; and in that ghostly, glimmering radiance a negro, crossing the river in his little bateau after a visit to his sweetheart's cabin, was suddenly aware of a monstrous black beast of the waters rushing down upon him. Groaning with superstitious terror, the man hid his face in his hands, and the bateau pitched and rocked as the monster surged past not five feet from the square bow. Miles farther down, well below the point

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 where his river joined another river to form one of the main water highways of the Low Country, the mad gator met the flood tide. For some distance he bucked the current; but as its sweep grew stronger, little by little he turned and, swinging far over toward the eastern bank, headed back upstream.

His frenzy was passing now, or else his strength was giving out. He drifted rather than swam, and the current kept him near the eastern shore. Hence, when he reached the place where the river divided, it was the eastern branch that he ascended and not the western, down which he had come and which would take him back to his home. On and on he drifted for hours—weak, dazed, suffering, but no longer insane, dully conscious of his surroundings. At last, passing close to the mouth of a marsh gully, he propelled himself with feeble movements of his tail into this small waterway and came to rest on a mud bank just within the entrance.

In this strange manner the king of the river came to a new country. It was in early April that he came; and about the middle of the following September, Sandy Jim Mayfield, the hawk-faced, white-haired woodsman who lived at the edge of a big swamp near the eastern river, set himself two tasks—two tasks that were much to his taste. He would

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 kill the great gator that was known as the king of the river and whose cunning had become famous in that region of the Low Country; and he would nail to his dining-room wall, bristling with more than fifty sets of antlers taken by him and his three sons, the massive, strangely palmated antlers of the big whitetail buck that had taken up his abode that spring in a laurel bottom near the southern end of the swamp.

These were undertakings which would test Mayfield's skill, but would surely add to his fame as a hunter and woodsman—the only sort of fame for which the old swamp ranger gave a snap of his horny fingers. For Sandy Jim, supremely confident of his own woodcraft, never doubted his success. Before the first frost of October the great armored hide of the river king would be drying in Mayfield's yard; and even sooner than that—for he preferred deer hunting to gator hunting—the splendid antlers of the flat-horned buck of Laurel Bay would be hoisted to the place of honor above the fireplace of the big room where Sandy Jim and his sons dined and smoked and talked, sometimes about crops, but more often about deer and dogs.

Mayfield lost no time in carrying out his plans. During the long Low Country summer the old woodsman was always lazy and indifferent; but invariably, as autumn drew near, his interest in life

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 revived—and life for him meant hunting. That afternoon he saddled his wiry mare and rode off through the pinelands toward the river ricefields. He had an idea that the flat-horned buck had taken to lying amid the reeds on a certain causeway, long ago fallen into disuse, connecting a large wooded island at the river's edge with the mainland. The spot was difficult of access and Mayfield had no expectation of getting a shot at the buck that afternoon; but he wanted to locate the animal's bed as a step in preparation for the hunt which he planned for the next morning.

Riding along the edge of the wooded highland toward the place where the ruined causeway made out across the green wilderness of the old rice fields, Sandy Jim suddenly slapped his thigh. He had learned much about the habits of the giant gator which had appeared in the river that spring and whose thunderous voice, deeper, more resonant, more menacing than any other voice of the springtime saurian chorus, had first apprised Mayfield of the monster's coming. But he had never discovered this great gator's basking place. Now, on a sudden, the woodsman believed that he understood why. Almost the only suitable locality that he had failed to examine was the muddy slope at a certain point on the old causeway toward which he was riding. He had never thought of looking there; the in

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 accessibility of the spot caused him to forget it; and now, as he turned the matter over in his mind, suspicion ripened to conviction.

He rode a quarter of a mile out of his way to a little knoll where a stunted live oak looked out over the wide wastes of river marsh. With almost simian litheness, in spite of his seventy years, he swung his light body from the saddle to the first of the live oak's limbs and climbed thirty feet up into the tree. For two minutes he gazed across the green expanse at a sunny spot on the slope of the causeway where the loop of a creek came in to the bank. When he dropped from the oak limb and reached for the shotgun which he had leaned against the tree trunk, his thin keen face looked more than ever like that of a hunting hawk.

A half hour later, the king of the river, stretched at full length close to the water's edge, woke suddenly. Perhaps he had felt the ground quiver slightly under him. The flat-horned buck had made no sound as he rose hurriedly from his bed in the tall reeds on the high level top of the causeway; but possibly the impact of his feet on the hard earth had sent an almost imperceptible tremor along the bank and down the muddy slope. Yet, of the three gators dozing there in the security of the safest basking place within many miles, only the river king awoke.

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 He awoke, but he did mot move. For two minutes, perhaps, he lay motionless as a log. Then from the reeds fifteen feet above him came a snort, followed by the sound of deers' hoofs hitting the sun-baked clay. Swiftly but noiselessly the leviathan form of the king of the river slid into the wine-brown water and vanished.

Five minutes after the great gator's disappearance, Sandy Jim Mayfield reached the point on the slope of the causeway for which he had been heading and saw what he had expected to see. Working his way on foot through the reeds, he had heard the snort of the flat-horned buck as the wily creature winded him and gave warning to the does; and, knowing the river king's reputation for wariness and wisdom, he considered it almost certain that the big saurian also had heard that snort and had interpreted it correctly. Hence, though he still pushed on slowly and cautiously toward the spot from which he had hoped to shoot the river king, he felt that his caution was wasted. The other gators which he had seen when he climbed the live oak might still be basking on the sunny slope, but he would not find the monster whose life he had sworn to take.

The old woodsman smiled as Ke crouched in the cover of the reeds, slowly drawing a bead on the larger of the two saurians still dozing on the mud. He was disappointed, yet pleased. This king of the

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 river, as he had heard the negroes call the saurian monarch, was a foeman worthy of his steel. Sandy Jim realized that he would need all his skill if he expected to stretch that great armored hide before the October frosts.

Many things Sandy Jim Mayfield knew about the deer and the alligators of the Low Country, for all his life he had lived close to these wild creatures, and all his life he had hunted them. But there were two things that he did not know—two things of primary importance to him just now. He did not know that the great gator, against whose cunning he had so confidently matched his own experience and skill, never waited until the October frosts before going into seclusion for the cold season, but always retired to his winter den in advance of most of his fellows, as soon as the crisp nights of September announced the approach of fall; and he did not know that the flat-horned buck, whose splendid antlers he so ardently desired, was that rare thing, a roaming, wandering whitetail, which, instead of remaining year after year in the same general region, ranged widely about the Low Country, never lingering in any district where he was persistently hunted. Three days after Mayfield's fruitless attempt to stalk the king of the river on the ruined causeway came a cold change and the giant saurian was seen no more that season. Three times Mayfield and his

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 sons hunted the flat-horned buck with their full pack of lanky, long-eared hounds, and on the third hunt, Sandy Jim, trying a snap shot from his mare's back, thought that he had drawn blood. But after that hunt the flat-horned buck vanished as completely as though the earth had swallowed him, and never once that fall or winter was hair or hide or track of him seen again.

Chagrined at his failure, Mayfield consoled himself as best he could. The buck, he believed, would return sooner or later, for these were among the best feeding grounds for deer in all the Low Country. As for the king of the river, he would come forth from his secret den with the first warm breath of spring and he would come forth bold and hungry, craving red meat. Until he had filled his empty stomach he would be less cautious than usual. A yelping cur tethered at the water's edge would interest him tremendously. Sandy Jim bided his time.

March came in windy and chill, but toward the end of the month the weather broke and spring burst suddenly upon the Low Country in a blaze of sunshine and a glory of song. Maples flamed in the swamps; the wood-edges swarmed with varicolored warblers; the wild turkey hens built their nests of grass, pine straw and cane leaves in the

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 deep woods and the thicket-grown broom-grass fields; long-necked, long-tailed anhingas swung round and round like airplanes in the still upper air; tall blue herons and slim white egrets walked about over the flooded rice lands along the river flats. Sandy Jim heard a few gator voices at dawn and toward dusk, but the big bulls had not yet begun to make their dragon music. He heard no bellow which might be the challenge of the river king.

On the first warm day Mayfield, sitting hunched in his narrow square-nosed punt, his rifle leaning against the thwart in front of him, scouted the river, the ricefield canals and the long cypress-bordered backwater which made in from the creek a mile behind his house. On the second day he searched with equal diligence. On the third day, as he rested in the shade under the sycamores near the backwater's upper end, he heard the music of hounds.

They were his own dogs, he knew, and he remembered suddenly that his sons, weary of pork and butts meat, had planned one more deer hunt before the weather grew too warm. The law forbade spring deer hunting, but the law meant little in that remote corner of the Low Country. Sandy Jim, sitting cross-legged in his punt, listened eagerly to what his dogs were saying, comprehending their meaning as clearly as though they spoke his own tongue.

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 They told him that a deer had been jumped on the low myrtle-grown peninsula between the house and the backwater. That peninsula was both a haven and a trap. If the hunters guarded its upper end, the deer must run down the length of it toward the backwater and the flooded rice lands. With the pack pressing him hard, and with the whoops of the hunters sounding near at hand, he would hardly take to the open water on either side, but would run on and swim the deep break at the peninsula's lower end to reach the remnant of a low, narrow, marshy dike which, in the old rice-planting days, had divided the upper backwater from the lower. There he would be safe if hounds and hunters halted at 'the break. But if hounds or hunters swam the break and followed along the dike he would be doomed; for a dense mat of telanthera, a floating water growth through which no deer could swim, bordered the dike on both sides and inclosed its lower end. Thus the place was a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape.

Sandy Jim reviewed the situation swiftly. Then a grim smile twisted his hawklike face. His boys had chosen to hunt without him. He would show them something little to their liking. Knowing his sons, his dogs and every inch of the ground, he needed no clairvoyant powers to foretell the outcome of that hunt.

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 With long noiseless strokes of the paddle he drove the punt forward, heading down the upper backwater toward the dike at its lower end. Myrtles and young cedars bordered the dike for the greater part of its length, but there was one clear stretch of fully twenty yards where the deer must pass in full view; and Sandy Jim remembered a bushy willow, growing out of the butt of a great rotting log in the backwater, which would make an ideal ambush. Presently he wedged the punt's bow between two low branches of this willow and waited, rifle in hand, listening to the music of the oncoming pack.

Other ears hearkened to that music. The king of the river lay in the lower backwater fifty yards from the dike, his eyes and nostrils projecting above the glassy surface. That morning he had emerged from his winter den under the river bank; but the river water was still too cool to suit him, and he had cruised up the creek and had passed through a hidden tunnel under a ricefield dam into the backwater's lower sunny reaches where no currents stirred the slender water weeds. He had scarcely reached the place that he had in mind when the dogs' voices came to him; and instantly he was aware of a fierce, terrible hunger, the sequel of his long winter fast—hunger which would brook no delay.

The sudden craving for meat took possession of

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 him. He remembered a morning months ago when he had seen a dog trail a marsh rabbit along the low narrow dike toward which the pack seemed now to be heading. His periscope eyes began to slide across the surface of the water. At the outer edge of the thick carpet of water growths bordering the dike the eyes vanished. A minute later the gigantic head of the river king was thrust upward through the telanthera carpet near its inner margin.

A moment the huge head remained motionless, a dreadful apparition, incredibly sinister, the enormous jaws gaping slightly revealing long, conical, pointed teeth. An exultant burst of melody, louder than ever, rang out on the myrtle-grown peninsula a quarter of a mile away. With a surge and heave the monstrous black body of the giant saurian, trailing long weeds from the spines and ridges of its armor, reared itself out of the water and mounted the bank.

Sandy Jim Mayfield, alert and watchful behind the bushy willow in the upper backwater, jerked his rifle to his shoulder as he saw the vast bulk of the king of the river appear on the dike within fairly easy range. It was the opportunity for which the old woodsman had been waiting all winter, yet he let it pass. Like a flash his quick mind foresaw the

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 drama that was preparing; and instantly, too, he realized that in the enactment of that drama he might find an opportunity even better than this one. Only for a moment did he see the river king clearly. No sooner had the great saurian mounted the dike than he sank on his belly amid the tall dark-green rushes bordering it on both sides. These hid his head and most of his body from Mayfield's view, but the woodsman knew that the monster was lying on the low flattened ridge of the narrow bank, his head facing the quarter from which the dogs would come.

Mayfield figured the chances rapidly. He did not wish to lose a hound; yet he was keen to see what would happen. A few minutes more would tell the story. The dogs were nearing the break at the peninsula's lower end, and the deer must be swimming the break or already running along the dike. Myrtles extended in a dense hedge to within twenty feet of the place where the giant gator lay in ambush, and Sandy Jim could not see the deer until it had passed the last of these. He waited, every muscle taut, his rifle raised halfway to his shoulder.

A long-bodied, gray-brown shape shot into view from behind the last of the myrtles. Mayfield straighteged suddenly in his seat and muttered an exclamation of amazement. Beyond a shadow of a doubt it was the flat-horned buck. His antlers

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 were in velvet and were as yet scarcely half their full size, but the old woodsman knew that buck as well as he knew his own sons. Head held high, white flag jerking from side to side, the splendid stag bounded along the narrow bank, racing at full speed, yet appearing singularly deliberate and unconcerned, his dun body rising and falling with exquisite grace as he floated over the tall rushes and the low treacherous tangles of vine. He did not see the great gator lying in his path until he was almost upon the saurian and he had no time to prepare for the leap. Yet without hesitation, and apparently without extra effort, he soared with birdlike buoyancy more than twenty feet and, landing lightly and airily as though the leap were nothing, bounded on without a backward glance along the dike and into the cover of the screening myrtles beyond.

Mayfield, crouching in his punt, swore delightedly. Once, on the reed-grown causeway, the flat-horned buck had saved the king of the river. Now, by a strange trick of fate, the king of the river was squaring that account. The dogs had crossed the break and were coming in full cry. If nothing stopped them, in another five minutes they would bring the buck to bay at the dike's lower end where he must turn and face them or else drown miserably in the dense mat of floating water growths. But

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 Mayfield knew that no dog of his pack would pass the great saurian that held the narrow way. He waited eagerly, anxiously, wondering whether young Frank, the impetuous leader of the pack and the swiftest trailer, would see the danger in time or tush headlong to destruction.

Frank was well in the lead. His resonant voice, the clearest and mellowest in that woodland choir which made, to Sandy Jim's ears, the sweetest music ever heard by man, boomed out behind the last of the myrtles. Another quarter minute would decide his fate. Just clear of the bushes, a log lay across the dike. As the big black and white speckled hound hurdled it, his eyes lit upon the monstrous incredible thing in the path ahead of him—an appalling dragonlike bulk, reared upward on short, thick forelegs, the long armored body almost hidden from the hound's view by cavernous, tusk-studded, hugely yawning jaws.

A piercing half-human yell burst from the dog. He had seen the danger too late to check his next leap. Seemingly he was doomed. Yet terror gave him strength. Twisting his body in the air, the hound landed sideways and rolled and slid to the very brink of death. The giant gator, his gross body lurching horribly, launched himself forward; but long ago his weight had grown too great for his legs to uphold him and his rush fell short. A scant

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 ten inches from the scrambling dog, the mighty jaws snapped together with a hiss. Next moment, Frank, whimpering pitifully, every hair erect, had gained his feet and jumped clear of the danger zone.

Sandy Jim Mayfield breathed a deep sigh of relief. For an instant he had believed that he had sacrificed his best dog and he had bitterly cursed his own folly. But there was no time to waste. The rest of the pack—five gaunt hounds and a big brown shaggy beast, half hound, half Airedale, the killer of the crew—had reached the scene. Apprised of danger by Frank's howls and whines, they had looked before they leaped and none had come within reach of those gigantic jaws which could crush their bones like reed stems.

Sandy Jim knew that his chance had come. The king of the river, famished from his winter fast, his prey almost within his reach, heaved his massive body upward once more and tried another waddling rush. He had eyes for nothing except those dogs, the meat that a gator loves best; and Sandy Jim, crouching low, his rifle close to his hand, eased the punt out from behind the willow. Slowly and soundlessly he paddled, at first heading parallel with the dike, then, when the rushes hid him from the saurian's view, turning straight toward the bank. Along the edge of the water growth he pushed the boat inch by inch, screened by the tall green rushes.

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 and at last he laid down the paddle and reached cautiously for his rifle.

Mayfield smiled happily as he drew his bead. Not for worlds would he have missed the drama which he had witnessed; and not for worlds would he have let the flat-horned buck be killed at that season when his undeveloped antlers were scarcely worth having. The old woodsman would have a memorable tale to tell of how the river king had saved the great stag and thus had paid a debt which he owed. For a moment, as he gazed along the rifle barrel, Mayfield was tempted to shoot a little high.

The thought passed as quickly as it had come. The smile faded. The thin sun-tanned face pressed against the rifle stock was fierce and keen like that of a hunting hawk. The eager hounds leaped and bayed as the rifle cracked.

An hour later, Sandy Jim, approaching his house from the rear, walked up to the kitchen door. He had not seen his sons. He had sent the dogs back along the dike, and rather than swim the break, the hunters had ridden on with the pack toward the big swamp to try another drive. Mayfield slouched into the kitchen, where Gabe, the negro boy who cooked for him, was prodding the wood fire in the stove.

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 The old hunter explored the oven and found a square of hot cornbread.

"The flat-horned buck's come back," he drawled. "We'll get him this fall when his horns are prime."

He dropped into a chair and began to unlace his boots.

"I jes' killed that big gator they call the king of the river," he said casually. "We'll go down to the backwater after dinner an' take off his hide."

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 on that sandbank—the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy-coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling and separating till you could think you were looking at a dance of stars.

They commenced affairs very early on that sandbank, and they kept them up very late; and all the time there came from it a soft murmur of laughter and song. Ah me! if the aim of life were happiness and pleasure, Africa should send us missionaries instead of our sending them to her—but, fortunately for the work of the world, happiness is not. One thing I remember which struck me very much regarding the sandbank, and this was that Mme. Jacot found such pleasure in taking her work on to the verandah, where she could see it. I knew she did not care for the songs and the dancing. One day she said to me, "It is such a relief." "A relief?" I said. "Yes, do you not see that until it shows there is nothing but forest, forest, forest, and that still stretch of river. That bank is the only piece of clear ground I see in the year, and that only lasts a few weeks until the wet season comes, and then it goes, and there is nothing but forest, forest, forest, for another year. It is two years now since I came to this place; it may be I know not how many more before we go home again." I grieve to say, for my poor friend's sake, that her life at Kangwe was nearly at its end. Soon after my return to England I heard of the death of her husband from malignant fever. M. Jacot was a fine, powerful, energetic man, in the prime of life. He was a teetotaler and a vegetarian; and although constantly travelling to and fro in his district on his evangelising work, he had no foolish recklessness in him. No one would have thought that he would have been the first to go of us who used to sit round his hospitable table. His delicate wife, his two young children or I would have seemed far more likely. His loss will be a lasting one to the people he risked his life to (what he regarded) save. The natives held him in the greatest affection and respect, and his influence


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IDE would be high at Little Inlet an hour after sunrise. Shortly before dawn Jen Murray walked from his cabin at the edge of the marshes to the creek landing where he kept his boat. On his shoulder rested a rusty single-barreled shotgun. In his right hand he carried a surf line neatly coiled and a battered bait bucket half full of six-inch mullet. He walked briskly, because the November air was cold.

Jen welcomed that bite in the air. Among the dusky marshmen of the Low Country few could read more skillfully the signs pertaining to fish and ducks. This, to Jen's way of thinking, would be a perfect morning—chill and gray, with a rising tide sweeping on to high flood and a light offshore wind from the north. The combination was excellent. There would be bass in the surf at Little Inlet; the bluebill flocks would be winging in from the sea to the rivers and creeks of the marshlands; though the season was early, he might even find a few squadrons of black mallards.

The flooding tide lapped about the worm-eaten posts of the landing. Jen's square-headed, flat

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 bottomed bateau, tied to the outermost piling, was already afloat. With a grunt of satisfaction the marshman lowered his light wiry body into the boat, leaned the gun against a thwart where he could reach it in an instant, picked up his heavy homemade oars and began the long row down the winding march creek which would bring him to the back beach of the barrier island between the marshes and the sea.

Another fisherman was astir early that morning, and another hunter. Ten minutes after Jen's bateau had vanished in the gloom, a great blue heron, standing hump-backed and motionless on a limb of a water oak a hundred yards from the landing, suddenly straightened his slim body, craned his sinuous neck and launched into the air on wide, slow-beating pinions. Almost at the same moment a large black lump at the top of a tall dead pine fifty yards beyond the heron's oak came suddenly to life and assumed the shape of a bulky, dark-bodied, white-headed bird—a male bald eagle.

The eagle's keen ears had caught the swish of the heron's wings and the faint sound had awakened him. He saw the shadowy form of the heron sweeping past, and having thus explained the slight noise which had disturbed him, he lost all interest in the matter, and after stretching first one wing and then the other, set about preening his feathers

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 with his strong, hooked, yellow bill. For perhaps a quarter of an hour he devoted himself to his toilet, while the dawn brightened round him. Then he, too, spread his dark pinions and began the active business of the day.

Jen, halfway to Little Inlet now, saw a great blue heron winging with measured strokes across the marshes to his left. He paid no attention to the bird, for it was only one of many herons inhabiting the marshes, though this one seemed larger than most. Just before landing on the back beach of the barrier island, the marshman saw a bald eagle circling high in the air. To Jen the king of birds was a familiar spectacle. Lager to cast his bass line into the surf beside the inlet's mouth while the flood tide was still running fast, he gave the soaring bird scarcely a second glance.

Scanning the sunlit eastern horizon in search of bluebill flocks coming in from the ocean to the sheltered waters behind, he walked briskly across the sandy flats toward the front beach. When, about an hour and a half later, he returned to the boat, he did not know that the eagle was still circling almost directly overhead, but much higher, so high that it was now a mere spot against the pale-blue dome of the sky.

The marshman plodded across the soft sands toward the bateau, his gun across his shoulder, three

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 spotted-tailed surf bass from four to eight pounds in weight trailing by a cord from his left hand. Suddenly he halted. A quick glance behind had shown him a small black speck still far away over the ocean, a black speck which grew swiftly larger. Instantly he crouched close to the sand, then crawled hurriedly to a tuft of grass ten feet to his left. There he waited, his gun ready, his eyes fixed on the lone duck rushing straight toward him at the speed for which the bluebill is famous.

Other eyes marked that oncoming speck. The soaring eagle, though almost invisible from the ground, could see both duck and hunter with a distinctness which revealed nearly every detail; but for a time the eagle paid little attention to either, because he did not realize that far below there was about to be enacted a little drama from which he might profit. Not until smoke leaped from the muzzle of Jen's gun and the duck swerved sharply and seemed for a fraction of a second to stagger in the air did the eagle betray the slightest interest in what was taking place a thousand feet beneath him.

Then, however, he became in an instant a thing of amazing and almost terrible energy. His yellow eyes, under their frowning white brows, glared as though fire burned behind them; his powerful feet, armed with curved blue-black talons, opened and closed, opened again, then clenched more tightly

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 than ever; his hooked beak gaped momentarily as his harsh, fierce challenge rang unheard through the solitude around him. Next moment he was shooting at terrific speed down a long steep incline, his wings half closed, his tail half spread, his head and neck thrust forward so that his body was like a great arrowhead cleaving the air.

The duck, mortally wounded yet even in its dying moments strong of wing, had passed a hundred yards beyond the marshman before it fell. Jen, grumbling a little because it had fallen not on the sands, where he could have recovered it more easily, but into the water beyond a fringe of marsh, was in the act of picking up his bass when a swift shadow sped across the sand close by him.

Instinctively he glanced upward, then dropped his fish and ran toward the marsh, breeching his gun as he ran and fumbling in his pocket for another cartridge. He found it and jammed the gun shut just as the eagle, abruptly checking his descent, hung for a moment twenty feet above the spot where the duck had fallen, then dropped out of sight behind the tall salt grass.

The big bird remained invisible for perhaps ten seconds. When he rose, the dead bluebill clutched in his talons, Jen threw the gun to his shoulder and fired. For some moments the marshman stood peering along the barrel; then he cursed with all the

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 vehemence at his command. Above the marshes the eagle flapped steadily onward, still holding his booty, his wide wings beating swiftly and strongly. Jen turned and plodded back through the mushy sands toward the spot where he had left his three bass. Just before stooping to pick them up, he breeched his gun, threw out the empty shell, inserted a new one and closed the weapon with a vicious snap which was an accurate indication of his temper.

His humor did not improve during the long row homeward. The morning had proved bitterly disappointing. True, he had three bass; but he should have had half a dozen. The flocks of bluebills from which he had expected to glean a few victims had not materialized—perhaps because the sky, instead of remaining overcast, had cleared just after sunrise. Finally the one duck that he had shot down had been stolen from him.

Jen grumbled and swore as he tugged at the heavy oars. His small eyes scanned the marshes and the sky as he rowed, seeking a victim, some living thing upon which to vent his disappointment. Eagerly he watched the gulls winging slowly above the marsh tideways. Once he snatched up the gun just too late to draw a bead on a yellowlegs which flew over him, sounding its mellow whistle and flashing its white rump. With a splashing of

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 webbed feet in water, a loon rose just around a bend of the creek, and Jen, reaching hastily for the gun, barked his knuckle against a tholepin. He was still sucking the bloody finger when a tall gray-blue bird, which had evidently taken alarm at the loon's hurried flight, flapped upward out of a small gully behind a peninsula of salt grass.

It was a long shot for one of Jen's cheap blackpowder shells, but the great blue heron, even larger than most of its kind, was a tempting target. The marshman jerked the gun to his shoulder, aimed carefully and fired. The heron collapsed in the air and, whirling round and round, fell into the marsh a hundred feet from the edge of the creek. Jen picked up his oars and continued his journey, his mood somewhat less savage than before. He would have been better pleased if he had killed the big bird outright; but there was satisfaction in the thought that he had smashed its wing and brought it down crippled and helpless to become prey for the marshland minks.

Jen's temper would have been still further improved if he could have seen at that moment the result of the shot which he had fired perhaps a half hour before—the shot fired at the bald eagle which had robbed him of his duck. He had not missed

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 as he supposed. One duck shot had struck the eagle's body near the base of the right wing. It must have pierced or torn some muscle or tendon essential for the operation of that wing; for, although for some minutes the great bird had continued to drive forward and upward with strong steady strokes, each wing beat brought a stab of pain which rapidly became intolerable. Had Jen followed the eagle's flight a few moments longer he would have seen the bird waver in the air before it had flown a mile, then turn and sail with set, rigid wings down to a small hummock in the marsh known as Half-Acre Island.

Tall large-leaved weeds, yellow and drooping now that summer had passed, interspersed with tufts of stiff-stemmed, gray-green grass, covered the hummock's surface. Here and there stood small dense clumps of evergreen cassena bushes, salt-water myrtles and sword-bladed, needle-pointed yuccas. Near the middle of the little island an ancient live oak, stunted but vigorous and green, cast a shade so dense that neither weeds nor grass grew within the circle of its branches. In the cassenas a small colony of Louisiana herons had reared their young. Their abandoned platforms of sticks were scattered everywhere through the evergreen thickets, which supported also the deserted homes of scores of boat-tailed grackles. In spring and early summer the

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 hummock had been a populous bird city clamorous with the cries of nestlings, alive with the quiver of wings. But now, as the wounded eagle planed toward it on pinions which seemed to have lost the power of movement, he detected no sign of life on the hummock, no stirring among the thickets, no sound of beast or of bird.

The silence and stillness of the place reassured him. He knew that he was in trouble and he would have sought a more remote retreat if that had been possible; but he had turned toward Half-Acre Island because his wings would bear him no farther and he must land there or fall into the open marsh. Perhaps it was some deep-seated instinct, perhaps it was mere chance which caused him, wounded though he was, to retain his hold upon the duck; but the added weight of this burden pulled him lower and lower as he neared the hummock so that he could not land in the live oak as he had intended, but came to rest on the ground close to the island's muddy shore. He stood for some moments on the duck's body, looking about him and listening. Then suddenly he turned his head, faced quickly about and crouched with half-opened wings, his bright eyes glaring defiance under their frowning brows.

Creeping toward him through the grass, inch by inch, foot by foot, a female gray fox dragged her

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 body forward. Already she had crept within leaping distance of the eagle; and the big bird, conscious of his inability to use his pinions, stiffened his muscles for the onset. But the sudden assault which he expected did not come. The fox, perceiving that she had been discovered, abandoned her effort to approach unseen. But she did not leap to the attack; she did not circle the eagle swiftly and lightly to get within his guard and frighten him into abandoning his prey. She advanced more rapidly than before; but it was a slow, pitiful advance, painful and laborious; for behind her, as she dragged herself onward, her hind legs trailed limp and useless.

The paths of the bald eagle and the gray fox do not cross. They inhabit separate kingdoms: the eagle, the kingdom of the air, the marshes, the lonely sea-island beaches; the fox, the kingdom of the woods, the thicket-grown broom-grass fields, the moss-curtained swamps. Never before had this fox of Half-Acre Island attacked an eagle, nor would she have done so single-handed under ordinary circumstances. Never before had the wounded eagle which had sought Half-Acre as a refuge found himself confronted by an enemy like the one that faced him now. His was the bolder, more arrogant spirit; his, too, perhaps, the more formidable armament. But in this encounter the decisive factor was the

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 crippled fox's gnawing insistent hunger—hunger so terrible that to assuage it she would have faced almost any odds.

Two weeks before, at the edge of a broom-grass field on the mainland, a charge of turkey shot from Jen Murray's gun had ripped the muscles of her back above the haunches. Hard pressed by Jen's dog, she had been forced to take to the salt marshes and plunge into a marsh creek. In the ice-cold water the torn muscles of her back had stiffened suddenly and her hind legs had grown numb. She had become almost helpless, and the ebbing tide had carried her downstream far out into the marshlands. The creek swung close to Half-Acre Island, and by a desperate effort she had dragged herself out of the water and had reached the hummock.

There she had eked out a precarious existence, a prisoner on Half-Acre, because, with her hind legs useless to her, she could not cross the surrounding waste of boggy, treacherous marsh. Crippled though she was, she had managed to find food from time to time, while a small sink-hole near the island's center, deepened some years previously by plume hunters who had camped on the hummock, provided enough water to relieve her thirst. But the problem of existence had grown more and more difficult. She had fasted for nearly two days when she saw a great white-headed bird sail in from the

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 marshes, bearing a duck in its claws; and the scent of that duck in her nostrils filled her with sudden frenzy which counted no cost.

There was no similar compelling motive to inflame the eagle's spirit. He was not particularly hungry. Wounded and in pain from his wound, aware that his wings were useless to him, apprehensive of other enemies in the thickets surrounding him, he struck once with his long curved claws at the fox's head as it came within reach, then hopped awkwardly sideways and backward, retreating, but keeping his face to his foe. One claw raked the fox's nose and drew blood; but, insensible to the pain, she seized the duck in her jaws, crunched it, tore it and devoured it on the spot, paying no further attention to the big bird which she had driven from his prey.

The eagle did not wait for her to finish her meal. Walking awkwardly through the grass, he made his way around the island's shore, keeping as far as possible from the thickets. On the other side of the hummock the grass and weeds were less dense, the cassena clumps more widely separated. Presently he turned inland for perhaps a dozen yards to the foot of a small dead cedar half uprooted by a gale, clambered up its stout slanting stem and, passing with some difficulty from branch to branch, took his stand at the top of the little tree perhaps fifteen

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 feet above the ground. There he remained throughout the rest of the day, and there night found him.

Another cripple came to Half-Acre Island that evening—another victim of Jen Murray's gun. The great blue heron which Jen had shot down had fallen perhaps three-quarters of a mile from the hummock. His left wing was shattered; it dangled useless and limp. But no shot had entered the heron's body, and he had no sooner struck ground than he was on his feet, striding swiftly up the muddy bed of the small gully into which he had fallen.

All day he wandered about the marshes or rested beside the little pools and rivulets left by the tide, in dreadful pain yet rousing himself now and then—for the heron is a voracious feeder—to catch a mullet or shrimp in the teeming shallows. Toward evening, when the throbbing of his broken wing had begun to pass into a sort of numbness, he fished for a while at the mouth of a small marsh brook emptying into a larger creek not more than two hundred yards from Half-Acre Island. His appetite satisfied, he bethought himself of a roosting place for the night. Near at hand he saw the lone live oak on Half-Acre and, following the bank of the creek which led in that: direction, he soon reached the

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 hummock. He could not get up into the oak; but by utilizing his bill and his long muscular neck, as well as his feet, he managed to clamber to the top of a cassena bush, where he would be safer than on the ground. On this perch he passed the night, unmolested by any foe.

So it happened that by an odd whim of fate three victims of Jen Murray's gun were gathered at the same time on a little hummock in the marshes—three wild creatures of widely different kinds, each rendered partly helpless by the marshman's powder and shot. To these three prisoners of Half-Acre the next few days brought varied fortunes. For the heron life grew somewhat brighter. His wing was smashed beyond repair; he would never fly again. But after that first day the pain which he suffered was comparatively slight; and he was a prisoner in only a limited sense, for he could roam widely over the marshes on his long legs.

His field of activity was greatly circumscribed, since, instead of flying from one fishing ground to another, he had to walk; but at that season, when all the tideways teemed with life, the fruits of the summer's increase, the heron did not have to travel far in order to find abundant food. He spent his days on the marshes surrounding the little island, fishing in the creeks and gullies for mullet and shrimp; but whereas before his wing was broken

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 he frequently continued his fishing long after dark, and on moonlight nights was often as active as in the day, he now abandoned night fishing altogether and invariably returned to the hummock before evening. There were dangers of the dark which he did not care to face crippled as he was, and always the going down of the sun was his signal for retirement to his safe perch in the top of the cassena thicket.

To the gray fox, on the other hand, the darkness which followed swiftly upon the gorgeous autumn sunsets frequently brought a revival of activity and energy, perhaps a renewal of hope. Always the night had been her friend and ally. It was then that she had tasted the keenest joys of living; it was then that the world in which she had lived became her world, hers to be enjoyed to the utmost in freedom and easy security from the dangers which abounded by day but vanished with the shutting down of the dark.

That freedom was hers no longer. Her useless hind limbs chained her to the hummock and she now sought food by day as well as by night, since the problem of getting enough to eat was so desperately difficult that it required all her time except brief intervals spent in sleeping. Yet when the darkness spread across the marshes and enveloped Half-Acre like a cloud, new strength seemed to come to her,

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 her faculties grew keener, the weariness and numbness of her spirit in large measure passed away.

Most of what little food she found was found at night. Small as the island was, it was considerably larger than its name implied and it supported a surprisingly numerous population of marsh rats whose shallow burrows still contained young. The fox, an old hand at digging out these burrows, subsisted largely on their inhabitants until she had depleted the supply. Occasionally she captured an adult rat by lying perfectly still, as though asleep, and crushing the animal with a sudden blow of her paw; and once in this same manner she had the good luck to kill a mink which was so much absorbed in following a trail that it failed to see her.

Insects grubbed out of the mold and little fiddler crabs captured along the muddy edges of the hummock helped to allay the cravings of her stomach. Some slight nourishment, too, was provided by long, slender green snakes and rather thick-bodied glass snakes, which had a queer habit of breaking themselves in two when her forepaw descended upon them. The supply of these was soon exhausted, however, and but for the coming of a series of abnormally high tides she must have starved before the arrival of the eagle and the heron which now shared her captivity on Half-Acre.

The marshes at that season abounded with clap-

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 per rails. When the rising waters flooded the low-lying grass plains and bathed the margins of the hummock itself they not only brought many big blue crabs, which the fox soon learned to capture and eat with relish, but they also drove scores of rails from the submerged marshes to the hum mock's shore. These noisy, rather stupid birds had little knowledge of any four-footed enemy except the mink. They moved about freely and boldly, although they were at a disadvantage in the darkness; and night after night the crippled fox, crouching motionless in the tall weeds close to the island's margin, dined on rail which had almost walked into her jaws.

But with the waning of the moon the tides went back to normal, filling the marsh creeks and rivulets, but no longer spreading across the grassy flats. Only rarely was the fox able to capture an unwary rail; the big crabs came no more; the marsh-rat burrows had nearly all been emptied of young; the scanty reptilian population of the hummock had ceased to exist. The blackbirds, grackles and fish crows, which often visited the place, were too wary to be captured. The fox was hungrier than she had ever been before when chance and her own desperation put her in possession of the bluebill duck which the wounded eagle had brought to the hummock in his claws.

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 This was the best meal that she had enjoyed since becoming a prisoner on Half-Acre, and it gave her new energy and strength. Her torn muscles were healing, though her hind legs were as yet incapable of bearing her weight; and that night she contrived to capture another rail. The following day, too, brought a stroke of good fortune in the shape of a full-grown rat so badly wounded by another of its combative race that it could hardly move; and some hours later she managed to ambush a wandering marsh rabbit. For a while the gray fox, except that her hind legs were still pitifully weak and stiff, was almost herself again, still hungry, but no longer mad with hunger—a cool, keen, careful schemer, sharper of wit than any other wild thing of the woods.

It was then that her wits, endowed once more with all their native cunning, began to plan the destruction of the other captives of Half-Acre, the wounded eagle and the wing-broken heron which were her fellow prisoners on the hummock and which would help to keep her alive if she could contrive to kill them.

The heron's plight she understood the moment she saw the bird. His left wing, matted with mud, dangled at his side; and she knew that he could not fly, though he could walk on his long legs much faster than she could drag her maimed body. But

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 for a time the eagle puzzled her. At first she paid no attention to him; but suddenly it dawned on her that he never stirred from his perch in the dead cedar sapling, that he had remained there all of one day and part of the next without spreading his wings.

She kept close watch on him during the rest of the second day and never once saw him move; and it may be that she knew then—for a fox's cunning is much more than instinct—that he, too, had lost the use of his wings and was a prisoner on Half-Acre. She realized, at any rate, that all was not well with the big white-headed bird standing stern and immovable in the dead cedar, watching the marshes and the sky with piercing yellow eyes which seemed always to be fixed on something infinitely far away.

With long, grim, confident patience the gray fox bided her time. Somehow she seemed to understand that a moment would come when the great bird in the dead cedar must topple from his perch.

If the eagle also had foreknowledge of that moment it was with a sort of regal resignation, a kingly fatalism that he awaited its coming. He was at once the most fortunate and the least fortunate of the prisoners of Half-Acre. His injury was

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 slight and would heal completely if he could keep himself alive in the meantime. But his broad pinions, which had never failed him before, were utterly useless now; and those pinions were essential to his life, an indispensable part of his hunting equipment. Without their aid he could not catch food; and although, like most birds of prey, he could endure sustained fasting, he must find sustenance sooner or later, or perish.

The heron, whose wings were not necessary for his fishing, was in no danger of starvation. The unfailing bounty of the marsh creeks would support him indefinitely. The fox's lot was harder. Yet she, too, could struggle against the fate that threatened her; she could fight with what weapons she still possessed to keep life in her body until she could use her legs again. But the eagle, so long as his wings were paralyzed, was utterly impotent; and from the first he seemed to comprehend the fact and to accept it grimly as one against which it was useless to contend.

Those piercing eyes looked always into the hazy distances and seemed to take no account of things near at hand. Their gaze rested on the white clouds which had been the eagle's companions on calm, windless mornings when he swung round and round on motionless wings in the high air, taking his ease in the upper solitudes where he had reigned. They

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 swept the wide expanses of the marshlands, golden brown now that autumn had come—vast plains of tall salt grasses watered by numberless winding creeks and tideways and filling all the broad spaces between the narrow barrier islands along the sea's edge and the mainland behind.

Hour after hour he followed with his eyes the comings and goings of the feathered peoples of the marshes—the big blue herons moving with stately deliberate wing beats; the long-tailed marsh harriers quartering the grassy plains; the ospreys circling and poising above the creeks, then plunging like feathered spearheads upon the fish which they had spied from above; the white crimson-billed terns winnowing the air, swooping and swerving with the grace of swallows, darting down at intervals with lightninglike swiftness upon their prey.

With a strange absorption, which must have had some deeper source than the cravings of appetite, the wounded eagle watched the wild duck hosts come in from the sea. Although in fall and winter, bluebill and mallard, teal and widgeon had formed part of his diet, fish had been his staple food. Yet always in the late afternoons he awaited with undiminished eagerness the coming of the fast-flying feathered regiments.

He saw them first, far away over the ocean be-

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 yond the barrier islands, as long faint streaks like wisps of smoke above the horizon, or else as dim gray clouds which moved and shifted and changed, darkening as they drew nearer and presently thinning out into black lines or irregular wedges shooting across the sky. Some of the smaller flocks passed near at hand, coming in above Little Inlet and flying comparatively low. But the larger flocks, many of them containing hundreds of ducks, passed for the most part farther to the southwest, where a river came down from the rice lands to the ocean. These were not bluebills, but mallards heading for the old ricefields and fresh-water marshes a few miles back from the coast; and as the days passed their numbers increased, so that sometimes toward sunset the eagle, gazing into the dim distance, could see thousands of them at the same moment as the long armies winged inland high in the air like trailers of cloud against the glowing sky.

His eyes fixed on these far-off things, his thoughts ranging the air and the marshes miles distant from the hummock which was his prison, the eagle may have remained for a long while unaware of the watcher waiting for him to die. Yet a time came when he saw the fox, and it may be that he understood somehow the significance of her vigil. At any rate, after some days had passed, the fox noted for the first time that the big bird was watching her

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 from his perch, calmly, coolly, yet with a certain fierceness gleaming in his yellow eyes.

Probably she did not understand clearly the meaning of that intent, steady gaze. She had had no experience with eagles and it did not occur to her to regard this one as a possible menace; yet the chances are that the eagle was now watching her for the same grim reason which had caused her to watch him—that the hunger which had begun to torture him was focusing his thoughts upon her as a possible source of food.

She was the one living thing that ever came within his reach, spending a part of each day lying half hidden in the grass not more than thirty feet from his perch. The habit of a lifetime was strong in him. Every morning before dawn he preened his feathers and went through his regular stretching exercises; and whereas at first he could not move his wings without acute pain, the injured muscle had now so far healed that he could open his pinions to more than half their accustomed spread. He knew that he was not yet able to fly, that he could not flap his wings strongly or ascend into the air. But he could easily glide down to where the fox lay and land squarely upon her; and more and more intently, as his hunger sharpened, he watched her lying there; more and more definite became the

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 prompting to launch himself forward and downward.

The fox, though she watched the eagle closely, seldom remained long in her grassy bed near his perch. Except when sleeping, she was generally moving about in her search for food, and she was able to carry on this search somewhat more actively because her hind legs, though very far from normal, were no longer totally useless to her. Her increased mobility offset to a certain extent the inroads which she had made upon the food resources of the hummock. Food was scarcer, but she could seek it more effectively; and though seldom free from the pinch of hunger, she found enough sustenance to keep going. She never forgot the eagle, but her war against him was a waiting game in which she could do nothing but wait. Against the other prisoner of Half-Acre she could proceed more vigorously.

Again and again she tried to capture the wing-broken blue heron. She knew the tall bird's habits well; knew that each morning well after daylight he came down from his safe perch in the cassena, strode across the hummock and disappeared in the marshes, and that each afternoon well before dark he returned. Three times she tried to ambush him, lying concealed in the grass or weeds near the hummock's edge; but each time the heron chose another route. One afternoon she hid herself near the foot

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 of his cassena, but the heron saw her in time and spent the night in another bush. Mere chance gave her the opportunity which she had so often sought vainly.

She was lying half asleep, about an hour before sunset, in her bed near the eagle's cedar. Suddenly the heron, returning to his perch earlier than usual and striding through the high grass with less than his accustomed caution, stepped almost upon her. In an instant her jaws clamped upon his long leg just above the toes.

With a hoarse cry the heron sprang upward, his uninjured wing beating the air and buffeting the fox's head. But those long, strong jaws held fast, crunched tighter and tighter on the black slender leg, then with a sudden effort crushed: the bone. The eagle, watching from his perch, his yellow eyes glowing more fiercely than ever now, saw the fox lurch awkwardly forward, striking with her forepaw to beat the big blue-gray bird to the ground. He saw the heron, forced backward so that he was half standing, half sitting, stab fiercely again and again at the fox's face with his bill, his long neck thrusting like a striking snake, his straight, javelinlike beak darting in and out, in and out with triphammer swiftness.

The eagle's head dropped lower; his wide dark wings unfolded. A moment he poised on his perch.

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 Then, with a scream, he planed swiftly down through the air, his talons spread, his hooked bill partly open. Already he seemed to taste the life-giving meat that he craved. Coming from above and behind, he would strike the fox just forward of the shoulders and sink his long claws into her nape.

By a tenth of a second he was too late to strike the spot at which he aimed. The fox, her hindquarters too stiff and weak to permit of swift maneuvring, had been compelled to take her punishment. She lay on her chest, her jaws clamped on the heron's leg, one furry forepaw raised as a shield against the tall bird's blows. But that slim foreleg was an ineffectual buckler. She could not parry thd darting snakelike thrusts that followed one another with frenzied rapidity. Before the fight had lasted twenty seconds the heron's long sharp-pointed bill had stabbed her in half a dozen places. Yet these wounds, though most of them were in the face, were comparatively slight; and in spite of the blinding blood and stinging pain, she kept her grip on the heron's leg, striving meantime to force her body forward upon her captive.

Then, a fraction of a moment before the eagle struck his quarry, the heron's javelin found the mark it had been seeking. Driven with all the force of that sinewy neck, the needle point of the heavy

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 tapering bill, fully seven inches in length, pierced the fox's right eye, penetrated deep into the cavity behind it and remained there, too tightly wedged to be withdrawn.

The fox shivered, writhed, twisted over on her flank; and the eagle, falling upon her at that instant, struck her, not upon the nape but upon the side of her neck, so that the curved claws of one of his powerful feet were buried in her throat. The big bird's weight held her down. She struggled desperately, but crippled as she was, she could not rise; and meanwhile, with the fury of famine, the eagle plied beak and talons.

Toward the last, when the fox had ceased struggling, the eagle, as though suddenly reminded of the presence of another victim whose body would provide food, reached out with one great clawed foot and, grasping the heron's neck just behind the head, at one wrench tore out the tall bird's life.

There was meat enough then for one of the prisoners of Half-Acre, meat enough to keep him for many days; and before those days had passed the torn tendon of his wing would have healed and he would be free again.

Five nights later a brisk northeaster set in. Tide was at high flood shortly after sunrise; and Jen

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 Murray, rising with the sun, looked out of the one window of his hut and observed with satisfaction that the water was well up in the marshes so that only the tips of the tall grasses showed above the surface. It was a perfect morning for rail shooting—the kind of morning when he could kill two or three dozen marsh hens, as he called them, before the tide dropped. The law forbade the selling of game birds, but Jen had never been a stickler for the law. In fall and early winter the marketing of clapper rails was one of his regular sources of income.

Poling his light bateau across the flooded flats, within an hour he had bagged twenty birds. Some he shot in the water as they swam from one raft of floating sedge to another; others he knocked over in the air as they rose in slow, fluttering flight before his boat. Then, though the water was still high, there came a lull in the shooting. Jen, finding no more birds in the open, turned his punt toward Half-Acre Island. Always when the big tides came many rail took refuge on that little hummock in the midst of the marshes. A walk around its edge should net Jen a dozen or more.

The marshman poled to the hummock and stepped ashore, holding his gun ready. Slowly he worked his way around the island's margin, knee-deep in the tall grasses and weeds. A rail flushed

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 well ahead of him, but Jen, his finger on the trigger, Judged the distance to be too great. Suddenly, as he rounded a low clump of myrtles close to the island's edge, he jerked the gun to his shoulder. A great, dark-bodied, white-headed bird had launched itself out of a small dead cedar, a magnificent bald eagle.

Even as he aimed the marshman noted a strange clumsiness in the eagle's flight, a slowness of wing beats, a certain heaviness, an appearance of labored effort, as though the big bird's pinions were scarcely equal to their task. The range was short; Jen, remembering that his shot were small, aimed for the head. The eagle dropped like a stone.

Jen turned away from the marshy rim of the hummock and strode through the grass and dead weeds toward the spot where the bird had fallen. Something in the grass a little to his right attracted his attention. For several minutes he studied the objects that he found there—the mangled carcass of a female gray fox and, close by it, the carcass of a great blue heron.

In the cold weather the bodies had suffered comparatively little change. Plainly the eagle had been feeding on them and had kept the vultures off; but Jen found two questions which puzzled him: How came this fox and this heron to be lying side by side

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 in the grass? And what was a gray fox doing on that little hummock in the marsh?

He turned away presently and dismissed these problems as of no practical importance. Before resuming his hunt for more marsh hens, he found the eagle's carcass and cut off the great dark-brown wings. There was a girl on a neighboring plantation who wanted a hawk-wing fan, and it occurred to him that these eagle pinions would please her. Later, however, he threw them into the mud, deciding that they were too troublesome to carry.

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ROM time to time during the night there al had been both sound and movement in the wood; but now, in the grayness of the November dawn, there was not even the flutter or the rustle of a leaf. The watcher behind the big pine log shivered. This, and not midnight, was the hour for ghosts and goblins in the swamp country—this pallid unearthly interval when the wild creatures of the night seemed to have withdrawn to their secret refuges and the wild creatures of the day had not yet ventured forth from their retreats. The lone watcher, long unused to the grim witchery of utter solitude, strained to catch the first reassuring sound which would announce the awakening of the daytime folk of the woods and prove that all life had not suddenly and mysteriously perished.

At last this sound came—a sharp metallic note from some small throat, slitting the silence like a miniature javelin. The watcher turned his head. Across the little glade at the edge of which his pine log lay, a narrow trail, hedged on each side by a dense growth of young pines, opened into the clear ing. He had selected his station behind the log so

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 that he could watch this trail, knowing that it would be a thoroughfare for all who happened to pass that way in the moonlight, and his good judgment had been rewarded.

Since midnight, when he had gone on watch, three glimpses of woods wild folk had been vouchsafed him. He had scarcely settled himself behind the log when a big buck with widely arching antlers walked slowly along the trail, leaped the dry bed of the little stream which before the summer drought had wound through the glade, and passed on without pause into the woods some twenty feet to windward of the watcher. An hour later a raccoon ambled by, taking the same course which the buck had followed; and not long before daylight the watcher suddenly realized that a doe had come from nowhere and was standing motionless in the glade, a shadowy, impalpable figure the outlines of which he could barely distinguish. Presently the doe vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared, and thenceforward the patient watcher saw no living thing, though now and again his ears told him that smaller wild folk, invisible in that faint light, were passing at intervals. With the approach of dawn even these infinitesimal noises ceased, and for half an hour or more the silence was absolute untill that first sharp, small, metallic voice for the morning punctured it with startling suddenness.

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iv and leading us to be too easily satisfied with the first efforts of performance. We therefore assume no other praise, than that of a lucky hit; than that we were lead by propitious destiny to a theme, which, if it had occurred before, would long since have been made the prey of fifty hungry scribblers.

We believe, and we hope our readers will thank us for the intelligence, that the world is continually growing wiser. There was a time, when nobody would read a book that had not been written half a century; and when, while antiquity shaded with her laurels the urns of authors already crumbled into dust, an Otway was suffered to starve upon a bulk, and Dryden could hardly find a grave. The world is now better disposed to do justice to living merit. Some of the great geniuses of the present day are revenged before hand, by the idolatry of their contemporaries, for the neglect they will experience from posterity; and


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 The sound came from across the glade, where the trail through the pine thicket opened. The watcher recognized the voice as that of a water thrush, and presently in the brightening light he saw the bird walking about on the ground with quick steps and an incessant seesaw motion of its tail, searching for insects amid the brown pine needles. He watched it with the keen interest that he felt in all living things, large or small, wondering whether it had come to the glade expecting to find the little stream which had rippled through the place before the drought. The stream's bed was now dry sand; but on the previous evening a brief shower had fallen; and on the other side of the glade, near the edge of a small canebrake, there was one low spot still moist. To this spot the water thrush soon found its way; and there fate descended upon it.

From the edge of the canebrake a tawny beast shot out into the open. With a startled cry the water thrush took wing, but a widespread paw, bristling with curved needle-pointed claws, caught it in mid-air and bore it lifeless to the ground. For a moment the lynx crouched motionless, one furry forefoot planted upon his victim, his pale eyes searching the shadows around the edges of the glade to make sure that no enemy had witnessed his leap from the shelter of the canes. Then, taking the bird in his mouth, he crossed the glade in three

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 bounds, making for the opening of the trail which led away through the pine thicket.

A low growl halted him. The watcher behind the pine log saw a strange sight, a sight which by itself was ample reward for his long vigil. At the entrance of the trail crouched another lynx, much larger than the first, his back arched, his glassy eyes glinting with a greenish light, his teeth bared in a menacing snarl. There was no mistaking the hostile purpose of this unlooked-for intruder, and he allowed no time for speculation. Hair bristling, white fangs gleaming, he stalked stiffly towards his smaller antagonist; then, as the latter backed away still holding the bird in his jaws, the big lynx launched himself forward in a long bound of almost incredible swiftness.

The struggle was far less noisy than the eager watcher behind the pine log had supposed that a fight between lynxes would be. Deep-throated savage snarls, now and again a low, mournful, repressed whine as fang or claw ripped through fur and hide to the white flesh underneath—these were the only sounds, and they would have been inaudible to a man if one had happened to pass twenty yards from the spot. Even in the fury of combat the instinct which renders the bay lynx the most silent and most mysterious inhabitant of the swamp woods kept its grip upon the two big cats.

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 Yet they were too much absorbed in their struggle to note that from behind the pine log the form of their most dreaded enemy had reared itself into full view—the form of a man, or rather a slim, tall, black-haired boy of seventeen or eighteen years, clad in the brown shirt and corduroys of a woodsman, leaning forward over the log the better to view the battle.

The boy knew that rival male lynxes sometimes fought fierce duels in the woods, but he had never witnessed one of these combats, and he watched this one with breathless interest. The flying leap of the larger lynx had overborne his opponent, and during the first few seconds of the fight the big lynx was on top, his body completely hiding that of his foe. Almost immediately, however, this condition was reversed. The action was so swift that the boy could not follow it in detail, for the combatants were a squirming, writhing, revolving mass, and, locked as they were in close embrace, they were indistinguishable from each other. Presently this revolving motion ceased and the boy saw that the smaller lynx was uppermost, its fangs apparently buried in the throat of its adversary. He concluded that for once pluck and skill had triumphed over size and weight, but in an instant he realized his mistake.

The hind legs of the larger lynx were working

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 like steam piston rods and his claws were tearing his enemy to ribbons, while with his forepaws and teeth he held his antagonist almost immovable. Evidently in lynx warfare the victor was he who kept his own shoulders pinned to the mat and fought upward from below, ripping and slashing with the ten sharp sheath knives with which his long muscular hind legs were equipped, knives which sooner or later would lay bare his foe's vitals. In a flash the boy saw that unless the smaller lynx could break away from that fatal embrace there could be but one ending. Moved by a sudden impulse of pity, he mounted the log with a shout and instantly the combatants flew apart, the smaller lynx shooting backward into the pine thicket, catapulted to safety by those same powerful hind legs of his enemy which a moment before had been ripping the life out of him.

The boy never saw him again. His attention was focused upon the victor, the biggest bay lynx that he had ever seen, facing him across the glade, its yellow eyes glaring amazement, hate and fear, its wide bearded face rendered almost demoniacal by the implacable fierceness of those eyes and by the savage snarl which revealed long teeth gleaming white in reddened jaws, teeth curved and thin like the teeth of a vampire. For a moment the boy stood spellbound, not with fear—for he knew the

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 bay lynx too well to anticipate an assault even in the case of so huge a lynx as this one—but with astonishment at the size of the beast and at the ferocity of its aspect. Then suddenly he was aware of something else even more astonishing.

This lynx had but one ear. There was no doubt about it, for the light was now strong enough to show him every detail of the creature. Yet the fact was so amazing to the boy that in his eagerness to verify it he forgot even the hideous beauty of those savage unwinking eyes which at first had held his gaze as though there lurked in the greenish-yellow depths of them some strange power akin to hypnotism. Completely satisfied at last, he did a queer thing, queer almost to madness. He got down very slowly from the log on the side nearest the lynx, taking care to make no sudden movement, and stretched himself on his back in the short grass within a dozen feet of the crouching animal. Then clasping his hands under his head he said, "Come on, Byng."

No sooner were the words uttered: than he regretted his rashness. He could no longer see the lynx, but there flashed into his mind a vision of those long vampirelike fangs and those relentless eyes. His body quivered as he strained to catch the faintest sound, and at once he was sure that he heard, despite the thumping of his heart, stealthy

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 footfalls slowly drawing nearer. A cold sweat chilled him; for a moment he was on the point of leaping to his feet. Yet, having begun his experiment, he was game enough to see it through, and once again he said calmly, 'Come on, Byng."

For perhaps half a minute more he lay still, fearing rather than hoping that his experiment would succeed. Then, slowly and still lying on his back, he turned his head.

The glade was empty.

The boy walked home through copper-splashed autumn woods and open savannahs of waving broom grass which with all their glory of gold and purple blooms could not keep his thoughts from returning again and again to the strange thing that had happened that morning. It was the strangest thing in all his experience, a thing the beginnings of which went back two years or more to those last days of his on the plantation before, in an evil moment, he had been persuaded to accept the offer of a former schoolmate in the North, whose father, a wealthy manufacturer, had gladly agreed to make an opening in his office for his son's closest friend. The plan had failed dismally. After many months of unhappiness in the rush and tumult of a great city, the boy, a planter born and bred, had given up a

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 fight not only hopeless but mistaken; and now he was back again amid the scenes that he loved and in the country that was his own—that wild and beautiful Low Country which in the old days had been the domain of the great rice planters, a country of great woods, deep swamps, wide marshes, secret secluded lagoons and many winding rivers.

He had come back to it with a joy that was almost ecstatic, longing for the sight of the gray weather-worn plantation house amid its moss-tapestried live oaks, for the sight and the sound of the happy Low Country black folk scarcely changed by all that had happened since the rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon startled the herons from the rice fields in the '60's; longing for the ample sweep of the river marshes and the grateful silences of the cypress swamps; longing most of all, perhaps, for the companionship of the abundant wild folk of the Low Country woods and waters, the deer and the tall bronze wild turkeys, the gleaming white herons and the fantastic long-shanked wood ibises, the vast fleets of ducks that covered the rice fields in winter, the innumerable hosts of singing birds that came with the spring.

In only one important respect had his long absence from these familiar scenes changed the boy. In the old days he had been an inveterate hunter. He now realized that though he was still a hunter

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 the lust of killing had gone out of him. He would not throw away his gun, a gun scarred with notches each one of which told a memorable tale of a buck or a gobbler; but he knew that now he would often forget to carry it with him when he went into the woods. For in those last weary months of his exile he had missed the wild folk not as game but as friends.

He had not carried it with him when, only two or three nights after his return to the plantation, he had gone out into the moonlit woods shortly before midnight to wait and watch until dawn at a certain spot which had been a favorite resort of his because it was a favorite resort of the wild folk also. He wanted no gun that night because his desire was not to kill, but to renew old acquaintanceships—to catch a glimpse, if luck favored him, of some of the wild creatures that move by night. He had been lucky beyond his highest hopes and he felt that the woods gods had prepared a special welcome for him upon his home-coming, showing him a wide-antlered buck and a doe, his wily old friend the coon, and, as a thrilling climax, a battle of lynxes, a rare sight which very few have ever witnessed. And even all this had not contented the gracious woods gods. They had so arranged matters that one of the battling lynxes should be a giant lynx with only one ear and that he should view this one-eared lynx from

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 behind a certain big pine log where once upon a time a strange thing had happened.

The boy's thoughts returned to that event of nearly three years before. Guests were expected at the plantation. His mother's ideas of hospitality required a wild turkey for the occasion, and he went out to try to get one. Before dawn he took his station behind the big pine log at a point where a low evergreen bush afforded additional concealment. At day-clean, as the Low Country woodsmen term the full dawn, he began calling. With his lips pressed against the bowl of an old brier pipe he could make sounds which only the wiliest of the long-bearded old gobblers could recognize as counterfeit. He called three or four times, waited a few minutes, then called again. It was just the hour when the turkeys should be coming down from the tall trees deep in the swamps to feed, and the boy listened eagerly for an answer to his summons.

Presently he heard a faint sound which, however, was certainly not made by a turkey. It came, he thought, from the reeds fringing the little canebrake at the edge of the glade, and he concluded that it was probably only a marsh rabbit. Sitting on the ground behind the log, his gun within easy reach of his right hand, he continued calling at intervals, using all his art, trying all the tricks of tone and of timbre which experience had taught him.

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 Suddenly he heard again that queer faint sound, this time close at hand and directly in front of him, just beyond the log and behind the evergreen bush. Leaning forward to look over the log, he found himself gazing straight into the glowing eyes of a lynx, crouched, poised, taut for the spring, almost in the very act of springing.

For a fraction of a minute neither boy nor wildcat stirred. Then, as the boy's hand shot towards his gun, the lynx sprang straight at him. Poised as she was, her mind and her muscles keyed up for her final leap upon the supposed turkey behind the log the moment the bird moved, she could not readjust herself upon the instant to the astounding discovery that this turkey which she had been stalking was a man.

The boy's quickness saved him from serious injury. He ducked like a flash, and the flying lynx passed between his face and his right hand gripping the gun, one hind claw scratching his knuckles as she passed. She struck the ground running, a brown streak flashing towards the cover of a dense thicket thirty yards away, and the boy was rather surprised when the load of turkey shot which went crashing after her bowled her over like a rabbit.

He was a little regretful when he found that she was a nursing mother, and his conscience compelled him to make a search for the kittens. He found

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 them an hour or so later, after he had gone back to the plantation house and returned with his big black-and-tan hound, but the dog killed two of the three before the boy could get to them. The third owed its life to the fact that, baby though it was, it made a brave fight against its huge foe. It was badly chewed about the head and ears and was covered with blood when the boy pulled the dog out of the lynx den in a great hollow oak stump and rescued the sole survivor of the family; but it was still full of fight as he wrapped it in his hunting coat, and once or twice during the walk back to the plantation house it made its claws felt even through that thick covering.

As soon as its wounds had healed, the striped and spotted bobtailed kitten throve amazingly. From a diet of milk it passed with evident relish to a diet of meat, and by the time it was three months old its size and strength already proved it to be an exceptional specimen of its kind. The boy kept it in a large wire-covered inclosure in the yard under a wide-spreading live oak and fed it himself with the greatest care. He knew that the bay lynx, or wildcat, is not easily tamed and that even when taken very young its savage instincts are always close to the surface. But the boy had a way of his own with animals, and although the young lynx hated and feared all the other members of the family and all

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 the plantation hands, it soon conceived a real affection for its master. Sometimes, when the plantation dogs were absent, he would let it out of its pen and the two would play games about the yard—games which often ended with the boy taking a nap under a tree, lying flat on his back in the shade, his head resting on his clasped hands. At such times the little lynx invariably jumped upon his big playmate's chest and, curling himself up, dozed there in great content, growling viciously at anyone who approached.

When the boy went North to begin his business career this comradeship ended. There was no one to whom the lynx, now more than half grown, could be given, for its dislike of all other human beings had become more intense as it grew older. Once when the boy had taken his pet with him to a wooded hollow near the house the lynx had gone bounding off after a rabbit. He had remained away nearly two hours and upon his return had shown for the first time in his life a certain coldness towards his master. This had worn off presently, but the boy understood its significance and remembered it.

As the time for his departure drew near he took the lynx again and again into the woods and thicket-bordered fields and generally managed to start a rabbit. Longer and longer grew the lynx's ab-

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 sences, and once he stayed in the woods all night. The next afternoon, an hour before sunset, the boy, feeling rather sad about it, prepared to make an end.

This time he went with the lynx far into the deep woods, three miles or more from the plantation house, at the edge of a great swamp; and this time he took his gun with him.

He walked, with his velvet-footed companion at his heels, along the margin of a reed-grown lagoon until a short-eared, short-legged marsh rabbit, slow and clumsy compared with a cottontail, jumped up in front of him, and the long-limbed, lanky wildcat went bounding away, gaining upon the fugitive at every leap. The boy waited a half minute, raised his gun and fired first one barrel, then the other. Reloading hurriedly, he fired two more shots, conscious of a certain pang as he recalled the frantic terror with which the discharge of a gun always inspired the lynx.

"Good-by, Byng," he said, with a touch of sentimentality by no means foreign to his nature. "If I ever see you again I'll know you. But I guess it's good-by forever."

But the woods gods ruled otherwise. After more than two years they had brought the boy and Byng together again. There was no doubt in the boy's

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