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 ing out toward the center of the lagoon, resumed his interrupted breakfast.

Already a small squadron of pintails had returned, and already the great fleets of coots had moved out again from the marginal waters so that they covered the lower part of the lagoon practically from shore to shore. There was no need for the shoveller to search the air in order to assure himself that the danger had passed. The careless confidence of the coots and pintails was a sufficient assurance, and, the danger having vanished, the fear which it had inspired had vanished also.

Yet the surface of the lagoon bore evidence of how real that danger had been, how well-founded was that fear. Twenty feet from the belt of reeds fringing the bank floated the carcass of the great blue heron which had met death by so strange and so dramatic an accident. The shoveller, after he had made out what it was, never glanced at it again. But if a man had examined the carcass, he would have found it smashed almost to a pulp by the terrific impact of that strange encounter in the air; and he would have noted, too, that the eagle, disappointed in his quest for choicer meat, had not fed upon the heron, but had left it contemptuously where it fell.

These details, however, were of no interest to the crippled shoveller, or to the other feathered

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 denizens of the lagoon, and none of them paid more than momentary attention to the floating mass of tousled feathers and shattered flesh and bone which afforded such impressive proof of their enemy's power. Swiftly the population of the pool increased. From the open water where he was feeding, surrounded by squadrons of boisterous, quacking mallards and gentle, soft-voiced teal, the shoveller drake could view a vast expanse of sky. He saw against the bright blue of the heavens, no longer obscured by mist, thousands of ducks of many kinds, not only the more abundant species like those feeding near him, but also widgeon and green-winged teal and even more numerous this morning than the mallards. Buffleheads, too, he saw in small numbers, lovers of the saltwater bays and inlets but questing inland to-day because a winter gale was sweeping the coast.

Flock after flock of all these varied forms shot at express-train speed across the field of his vision, to swerve, wheel, circle and finally settle in some one of the innumerable ponds or lagoons scattered everywhere over the broad river marshes and the watery flats. Yet in all that feathered concourse the shoveller drake saw not one duck of his own kind.

No hunter could tell why in some winters shovellers were common, while in other years scarcely

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 a shoveller could be found among all the legions of ducks congregated along the Low Country rivers. This winter was of the latter sort. Countless thousands of other ducks fed in the freshwater marshes and the flooded rice lands, but the shoveller regiments had chosen a different feeding ground.

At first the lone drake's searching of the air had no more specific motive than a vague but persistent longing for the companionship of his own species. Of late, however, this longing had become more definite, more poignant. Though winter still had many weeks to run, already he had donned his nuptial dress, already the mating instinct was strong in him. When he scanned the sky now, he was not looking for a flock of shovellers but for a female shoveller, for a mate whom he might woo and win in anticipation of that joyful honeymoon journey in the spring to the far-off northern lake where they would build their nest and rear their young.

Day after day the crippled drake had awaited the coming of that mate. Day after day he had waited and watched in vain. On this day also his search seemed doomed to failure. The sun reached and passed its zenith. The short winter afternoon faded and the night shut down. For hours the drake slept, his head resting on his back, his wide, spade-like bill half buried in his plumage. A large part of the night, however, he spent in feeding, paddling

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 swiftly along, his head half-submerged, straining water and mud through the comb-like teeth of his bill.

All about him in the darkness he heard the voices of feathered myriads, the hoarse or nasal tones of other ducks of half a dozen kinds, the incessant, infinitely varied conversation of the coots. Dawn came, and the mists of morning, then rosy sunlight melting the mists. Again the lone shoveller heard, far away across the marshes, that rolling thunder of innumerable wings which announced that the tyrant was abroad. But on this morning the thunder came no nearer. The big gray eagle was seeking his prey a little farther to the northward where the flats were wider and even more populous.

The morning hours passed quietly with no hint of notable developments in store. Then, just before noon, the great event befell.

The crippled drake saw her when she was half a mile away, a mere speck against the sky, seemingly indistinguishable at that distance from the hundreds of other ducks dotting the air. Instantly the pupils of his eyes contracted and their golden circlets glowed like flame. Straight onward she came, flying almost as fast as a teal, guided by chance or fate to the one pool in all that wilderness of marsh where another of her kind awaited her. Probably she saw the drake before she actually

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 alighted, for suddenly she swerved in the air and came to rest close beside him where he floated in a little open space in the midst of a great raft of coots.

Much as he had longed for her, impatiently as he had awaited her, he took her coming very calmly. With a low guttural "konk, konk," he swam slowly up to her, his head and neck held high, jerking his bill upward. She acknowledged his greeting by bobbing her head, and for some minutes the pair swam slowly in circles. Then, without further demonstration, the shoveller drake led his demure gray-brown sweetheart towards a shallow spot near the lagoon's margin where the soft, slimy mud was particularly rich in snails.

Within an hour of their meeting death struck close by them, so close that they could almost feel the wind from his wings. The tyrant was abroad again. Straight towards their pool that ominous thunder of pinions rolled across the flats as flock after flock of ducks rose and fled from the path of the eagle. The crippled drake, remembering suddenly his narrow escape of the day before, began swimming rapidly towards the reeds, while around him the coot fleet scattered and broke, and with a hiss and a roar of whirring pinions the duck squadrons bounded upward. Close behind the drake swam his mate, bound to him by an instinct even

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 stronger than the terror which urged her to spread her wings and fly.

This time the tyrant came more swiftly, driving through the air with powerful surging strokes which forced his big body forward at high speed. Ten feet behind the two swimming shovellers a coot gave a shrill cackling cry, opened his wings and struggled to lift himself from the surface. A dead weight pulled him back, a weight which clung to his right foot and held him fast. Desperately his wings beat the water, making a mighty commotion; and the tyrant, poising at that instant fifty feet above the pool, half closed his broad marbled pinions and plunged.

The female shoveller dived; the crippled drake, hampered by his broken wing, got himself under water a last. But the fierce eyes of the tyrant had not been fixed upon either of the shovellers. His target was the struggling coot; and the latter, unable either to dive or to fly because of the big terrapin which had fastened itself to his foot, was gripped and crushed in an instant by the tyrant's long curved claws. A moment the eagle's dark-gray wings labored mightily, their serrated tips brushing the water. Then the terrapin's hold gave way and the tyrant heaved upward with his prize.

Day followed day in the long, marsh-encircled

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 lagoon beside the river: days of placid enjoyment of the lagoon's rich stores of food: days of sudden alarms and thrilling adventures. Often the two shovellers saw the gray tyrant. Three times in as many weeks the crippled drake narrowly escaped those lethal talons. But his injured wing was healing; though he could not fly, he could dive more easily and he had learned to thwart the hunting eagle by disappearing promptly beneath the surface. His mate, too, seemed to understand that he could now fend for himself in his own way. Generally when the tyrant appeared she took wing with the other ducks, returning after the eagle had passed on.

There were other enemies besides the tyrant. Once, as the two shovellers dabbled for tiny molluscs close to the reed-bordered bank between the lagoon and the river, a mink sprang at them from a clump of jocko bushes. Wildcats, raccoons and foxes walked this bank by night, and more than once the shovellers heard in the darkness a shrill, tragic, choking cry which told them that some unwary coot, venturing ashore after nightfall, had met a bloody end.

When the tyrant himself did not come, there were wide-winged haunters of the marshes who could frighten although they could not harm. The great blue herons passing from time to time over the

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 lagoon; the turkey vultures sweeping and soaring against the sky; the long-tailed marsh harriers searching the reedy plains for the small furred and feathered game on which they fed—all these, as they swung over, cast swift-moving shadows upon the waters, shadows which spread sudden fright because they might be cast by the tyrant's wings.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly the mild Low Country winter changed to spring. Along the edges of the woods far away across the marshes swamp maples flamed a brilliant red; a mist of green clothed the willows on the old ricefield banks; in the high air tree swallows swarmed like gnats; still higher, a mere speck against the sky, the first water turkey of the season drew circles between white pinnacles of cloud.

The frog choruses swelled louder and louder; the thicket edges rang with the songs of birds; golden jessamine, dogwood and Cherokee rose glowed and glimmered in the swamps. The first ospreys came, the first martins, company after company of migrating white herons. These and many other travelers from the lower South brought new life to the river marshes; but as these lovers of warmth increased, the duck legions diminished.

Flock after flock took wing and returned no more. The hardy mallards went first; then the pintails and the green-winged teal. One by one the

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 squadrons of widgeons and began their long journey. In a single night all the marsh lagoons and flooded rice lands bordering the river were almost emptied of coots. Soon, of all the myriads of ducks which had spent the winter along the river flats, only a few small flocks of blue-winged teal, a half dozen belated widgeons or baldpates and the two shovellers remained.

The wind, which for days had blown from the east, swung southward. Suddenly the air grew languid and warm. The lagging baldpates disappeared. Coral-billed gallinules supplanted the rear-guard of the coots. An hour after the next sunrise the last flock of teal mounted as though at a signal, circled high, then headed away to the north. The shoveller drake and his mate watched them go; and just before they disappeared in the distance, the female shoveller, without a glance at her partner or a sound of farewell, bounded upward and whirred away in pursuit.

From a dead cedar at the edge of the pineland, far away across the marshes, a hawk pitched forward, opened long pointed wings, and shot northward at amazing speed—the speed of the peregrine falcon on the track of his prey. He passed like a winged projectile not more than a hundred yards from the lagoon of the shoveller drake. The latter did not see him, did not know that at the very out

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 set of her journey his mate must run a race with death. He knew only that his mate had left him and that she would not return—that, joyously, eagerly, exultantly, she had mounted at last to that broad blue road of the sky which for weeks had beckoned her, a road which led northward and ever northward to the far-off sloughs and prairie lakes where the wild duck myriads bred.

The golden circlets rimming the crippled drake's pupils glowed a brilliant orange. Rearing his body upward, he stood for an instant upon the surface of the water, his wings fanning the air. Not for weeks had he tried his pinions, dreading the burning agony which he had learned to associate with every effort to fly; but now his wings fanned faster and faster, and suddenly they lifted him. For a hundred yards he flew on, barely topping the taller reeds and sword rushes. Then he slumped abruptly downward, plunging with a splash into a flooded ricefield separated by a strip of marsh from the lagoon where he had spent so many weeks.

A month passed; a month of gnawing loneliness and incessant restlessness, spent dabbling in flooded ricefields and shallow marsh ponds which he shared with noisy gallinules, long-necked water turkeys, stately milk-white egrets, herons of several kinds and tall white and black ibises. He seldom saw the tyrant now because, with the departure of

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 the duck armies, the gray eagle had devoted himself to other prey. Day followed day uneventfully. Then, one still sunny morning as the lone drake feasted on water snails along the edge of a little peninsula of reeds, a black log lying half submerged near the margin came suddenly to life.

As the 'gator rushed, the drake, with a hoarse startled cry, opened his wings and launched upward from the surface. On and on he flew, rising higher and higher; on and on for fifty yards, a hundred, five hundred. His wings beat evenly and strongly. No sudden weakness or numbness assailed him. At first he flew due south, the direction in which he happened to be headed when the 'gator charged him; but gradually he swung in a wide half-circle until his long bill and slender neck pointed north.

The green marshes and the shimmering blue lagoons slid past beneath him. Far in front, a thousand miles away, a placid prairie lake, where perhaps his mate was swimming with her little ones, beckoned and lured him on.

The tyrant was taking his ease. In the frosty, windless upper air, so far above the earth that to the eyes of a man he would have appeared no larger than a gnat, he floated on outstretched wings as lightly as the white wisps of cloud drifting near him. This was his true kingdom, this lofty illim-

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 itable solitude; and it was there, "in those blue tracts above the thunder," that he had his throne.

He was most regal, most kinglike, when, as though contemptuous of the earth and of all earthbound creatures, he soared to heights unattainable by vulture or hawk or heron and from that dizzy altitude looked languidly down upon the varicolored world of green forests, blue lagoons and silvery serpentine rivers and creeks. It was then that he was like a throned monarch; for it was then that he was most completely at his ease, most secure in the strength that could lift him to such heights, most arrogant in the assurance of undisputed sovereignty. On earth there were enemies against whom he must be always on guard. At the lower levels of the air there were those who, while they could not injure him, might annoy him as a buzzing insect may annoy a lion. But the upper air was his. None ventured there except certain ones of his own royal race, and with these kindred kings he lived in peace.

Often it was peace that the tyrant sought when he mounted to these lofty fastnesses—the peace of boundless silence, of freedom from all possible danger, of complete mental relaxation. There was no need for watchfulness amid the clouds. There all his senses could rest; and there his wide wings, motionless except for occasional slight quiverings of their flexible tips, could perform their function al-

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 most automatically, without direction from his brain. Without fatigue, almost without effort, he could remain aloft for hours, sailing in great circles or wide ellipses, keeping the same level or, if the air currents were favorable, spiraling gradually upward until he approached the invisible upper frontier of his airy kingdom beyond which even the eagle cannot soar.

On this bright mid-spring morning drowsiness possessed him. Spring was a season of plenty when his unwilling purveyors, the ospreys, were numerous and industrious, yielding him a rich tribute of finny spoils. Although in winter he varied his fare by catching unwary coots or wounded ducks, fish had always been his favorite food; and now, with fish plentiful and easily obtained and with the labors of the nesting season behind him, the tyrant had abundant time for idleness and rest. Shortly after sunrise he had breakfasted upon a large mullet which an indignant osprey had surrendered to him. Then, languidly, lazily he had climbed to his high kingdom to spend the rest of the morning circling somnolently just under the motionless white clouds.

For nearly two hours the gray eagle had been soaring thus, more than half-asleep. Suddenly, his drowsiness fell from him. Far below him and to the south, a black speck was moving swiftly through the air. To his far-sighted eyes that speck had the

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 form of a duck, a duck whose wide, flat bill and slender neck identified it at once as a shoveller. Its course would bring it in a few minutes directly under the eagle; and apparently not until it was directly under him did the tyrant reach his decision.

Until that moment the eagle, though he watched the oncoming duck keenly with eyes that glowed fiercely under their beetling brows, continued his placid soaring. Then, as though he had become suddenly aware of something unperceived or unrealized until that instant, he half-closed his wings and slid downward through the hissing air.

The golden eyes of the shoveller drake, speeding northward at last on his long-delayed journey to the distant Canadian lake which all his life had been his summer home, searched the air lane ahead of him and the sky spaces above. Yet those eyes had not seen a certain sinister dark spot which had been moving slowly in wide circles perhaps a thousand feet or more above the line of the drake's flight.

The shoveller had missed that dark spot soaring just under the billowy white clouds because at the moment his attention was otherwise occupied. A half-hour had elapsed since he had begun his journey; and although at first the swiftness and evenness of his wingbeats seemed to prove beyond all doubt

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 that his injured pinion was now as strong and serviceable as ever, it was already evident that this appearance of completely restored strength was deceptive.

No human eye could have detected at this stage anything abnormal in the drake's manner of flight. But the drake himself knew that all was not well with him, that he could not fly as he was accustomed to fly; and the marvelous eyes of the gray eagle, looking straight down upon the drake as the latter passed far below him, perceived immediately that this was a duck whose powers of flight had been impaired. It was this discovery which of a sudden had determined the tyrant's course of action, and brought him shooting down like a feathered meteor from the upper air.

Possibly it was sound, not sight, which first apprised the shoveller of his peril. Possibly he heard, above the rush of the wind through his own pinions, a high, thin, wailing note the meaning of which he knew—the keen, wild song which the wind sings when it is smitten and cleft by the hard edges of the eagle's wings as the king of birds plunges upon his prey. More likely the drake's golden eyes first warned him of the danger, flaring orange-red with terror as they lit suddenly upon the dark down-rushing bulk behind and above him.

If, until then, that distant prairie lake where

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 perhaps his mate dabbled with her little ones had beckoned him, the vision was instantly blotted out. Panic swept over him like a wave, gripped and stabbed him like death's claw. Yet even in his panic he did the one thing that might save him.

Directly beneath him lay a wide plain of river marsh; but not more than a quarter of a mile to his right a long loop of the wide, winding river glittered in the sun. This was his haven if he could reach it; and instantly he wheeled in the air and, tilting his body sharply forward, drove with all the strength of his pinions directly towards the river's smooth expanse. Beneath that silvery mirror-like surface life awaited him. Towards that goal he ran his race with death.

It was a brave race. Until its final tenth of a second, its issue was in doubt. The drake's swift maneuver, his sudden wheel to the right, gained him some twenty yards. For a moment he no longer heard that thin, keen, wailing note behind and above him. But almost instantly he heard it again, and swiftly it sharpened to a hiss which in turn became a loud, angry, rustling noise like the rushing of wind through bending tree-tops.

Fifteen feet above the surface of the river the race ended—ended with a savage downward thrust of widespread blue-black talons and a smother of great gray wings furiously lashing the air. The

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 gray tyrant swept buoyantly onward and upward, gripping in his claws the white and russet body of the drake, the long green neck dangling limply. Three miles away, in a tall pine on a wooded island in the marsh, there was an abandoned eagle nest which the tyrant sometimes used as a storehouse for food. Towards this nest he set his course.

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LMAYNE saw Awi Agwa for the first A time one clear, cold autumn morning on Sani'gilagi, the highest of the Cowees. Almayne was a young man then. He was a wilderness hunter, a trader in peltries, an Indian fighter when the war drums throbbed in the Overhills; but not many years before, he had been a schoolboy in England, with a liking for books. From the great precipice of Sani'gilagi he had just watched a crimson September sunrise, and the glory of it had stirred him deeply.

That was why he did not kill Awi Agwa that first day. From his camp near the summit of the mountain he had walked a few hundred yards down the ridge in search of water. In a small level meadow on the crest of the ridge he came suddenly upon a giant elk, the largest elk that he had ever seen, standing on the very verge of the precipice, gazing out over the wide expanse of forested hills and valleys. Forty yards behind the elk, the long yellow form of a puma, stretched lazily upon a flat sunny rock, caught his eye.

Neither animal saw or scented the other. Neither

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 was aware of the hunter. Almayne chose the elk as his target. Crouching behind a boulder at the meadow's upper end, he gazed along his rifle barrel at the superb stately figure sharply outlined against the sky. He had seen hundreds of elk, thousands of buffalo, perhaps tens of thousands of deer; but in five years in the wilderness he had seen nothing so magnificent as this huge, perfectly proportioned, nobly antlered elk bull posed like a majestic statue of golden-bronze on the brink of the abyss.

A sudden repugnance surged up in him. It seemed to him that the thing which he was about to do would be murder or worse. He did not stop to analyze the impulse or to argue against it. He swung the long rifle slowly to the right until his gray-blue eyes, sighting along the barrel, saw not the elk but the tawny shoulder of the puma. His finger touched the trigger gently. The puma bounded forward, stood rigid, toppled sideways and lay still.

Almayne scarcely glanced at the sprawling body of the big lion-like cat. At the roar of the long heavy rifle the elk whirled in his tracks so that he faced the hunter, head high, antlers laid back along his shaggy neck. For half a minute he stood motionless. Then he saw Almayne's head and shoulders thrust up above the boulder. Instantly the great bull whirled again, raced in a plunging gallop across the open and vanished amid the trees beyond.

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 Almayne, as he skinned the puma, wondered at himself. The hide of that huge elk would have been worth five times as much as the puma hide, which was rather a poor one. Moreover, if he had killed the elk, he could have had breakfast before starting his day's journey, whereas now he must wait until he could knock over a grouse or a rabbit on his way down the mountain. He was ashamed of his own foolishness. Nevertheless, a week later he told the story to Julah the Fox as they talked by a campfire beside the Great Path far down among the foothills.

The old Indian heard him through and sat silent for many minutes, staring into the fire with stony, expressionless face. At last his lips opened.

"My brother knows," he said in his own tongue, "that I am a shaman as well as a warrior. I will read the omen. My brother Almayne was foolish. He did a foolish thing. He camped on Sani'gilagi, the holy mountain. The Spirit was angered. He sent an elk and a puma. Klandaghi the puma is sacred. Awi Agwa the elk is proper game. The Spirit bewitched Almayne so that he killed Klandaghi and let Awi Agwa go unharmed."

Almayne suppressed a yawn.

"And what will come of it, Julah?" he asked gravely.

"I know not," replied the red man. "I am not

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 of the Adawehi, the Great Wizards. But evil will come of it. There is a curse upon my brother Almayne. I cannot read the curse; but when Awi Agwa shows himself again, let Almayne kill him."

Julah the Fox went on his way at daylight. He was returning to his home in the Cherokee nation in the valley of Ocona Lufta under the eastern rampart of the Smokies. Almayne, on the other hand, was bound for Charles Town, having with him three pack ponies laden with beaver skins; and the two had met by chance on the Great Path, as the long wilderness trail from the mountains to the sea was known. Almayne, being in no hurry, slept late. The sun was two hours high when he resumed his journey.

Riding his sorrel Chicasaw mare behind the plodding pack ponies, he watched with indifferent yet observant eyes the familiar panorama of the forest's teeming life. The trail wound serpent-like amid the wooded hills—a narrow road but well trodden by the hoofs of the pack trains that now used it in increasing numbers and by the moccasined feet of Indians who had traveled it perhaps for centuries before the white men came. On either side lay the forest, virgin, untouched by the axe—a forest of gigantic broad-leafed trees, oak, hickory, beech and many others, whose branches

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 mingling overhead cast a shade too dense for undergrowth to subsist. Down the long shadowy vistas amid the column-like tree-trunks Almayne's gray eyes roamed restlessly, viewing many things.

Everywhere he saw deer. In this paradise of the foothills the whitetails still swarmed in incalculable numbers—in numbers which seemed not to have diminished at all since the first white hunters had pushed inland from the coast. Once, far away, at the farther end of a sun-dappled forest aisle, he saw a troop of nine buffalo traveling northward in single file behind a shaggy old bull; and once, when the forest opened to enclose one of those beautiful green meadows or forest-prairies which were scattered here and there through the primeval woods, he saw a much larger herd, fifty or sixty animals at least, standing shoulder-deep in lush maiden canes and wild pea vines. Ahead of him a lumbering black bear crossed the trail. A half-mile farther along, a lynx which had been lying along a beech limb almost overhanging the road, leaped lightly to the ground and bounded away into the forest.

Most of these Almayne viewed with languid interest. They were the common things of life, the everyday sights of the wilderness. The buffalo held his attention while they were within view, for they were less abundant here to the eastward of the Appalachians than in the almost unknown coun-

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 try beyond the mountain barrier; but he scarcely turned his head to look at the troops of deer. His thoughts were busy with other matters.

These were good times, he reflected, these times when the Great Path could be traveled in safety without fear of ambuscade. From Charles Town to Tellequo beyond the Overhills where Moytoy the red Emperor reigned, peace prevailed along the wilderness road. Cherokee, Choctaw, Muskogee and Catawba called the white man friend. How long this friendship would last no man could tell. It sufficed Almayne that for the present peace was secure.

A sharp, loud, whining, singing sound shrilled for a fraction of an instant in his ear. An arrow had whizzed above his right shoulder, missing his throat by an inch. Even as he wheeled his pony, he felt something touch the fringed sleeve of his buckskin shirt just above the elbow. A second shaft had grazed his arm, barely scratching the skin. Bending low on the sorrel mare's back, he dug his heels into her flanks and talked to her in the guttural tongue that she knew best.

"Faster, my little Martin-bird!" he whispered. "Faster, my little Tlutlu! Faster, faster, faster!"

Tlutlu the Martin-bird raced as she had seldom raced before. But she could not outrun the arrows. Another shaft whined past Almayne, another and

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 yet another. He heard the crash of a rifle, the thud of a bullet against a tree-trunk ahead of him. Again a rifle roared behind him; the mare staggered and nearly fell. Almayne knew what had happened. A bullet had struck her right hind leg low down and had splintered the bone or cut a tendon. Gamely she struggled on; but Almayne, swinging his leg over her neck, leaped from the saddle, landing lightly as a cat. He struck the ground running.

"Good-bye, little Tlutlu," he cried. Lips tight, eyes blazing, his long rifle gripped in his right hand, he dashed into the forest to the right of the trail.

At his best speed he ran on and on through the woods, already fairly sure that he was safe. He had a good start and was fast on his feet, and from the slope of the land he judged that a creek or river lay ahead of him. Dense belts of cane bordered the foothill streams and in a canebrake a hundred Indians could not find him. He would be able, he thought, to gain the shelter of the canes, for he knew that his assailants were unmounted. A quick glance down the trail behind him just before the mare was struck had identified them instantly—a dozen or more Senecas, warriors of the Northern Iroquois, who had traveled far beyond their own boundaries to raid the Southern trading paths.

These raiders from the North traveled always on foot because they could the more easily lose them-

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 selves in the forest; and they would attempt no extended pursuit because they were in the country of their enemies. So Almayne reflected as he ran, glancing often over his shoulder, searching for shadowy brown figures leaping after him amid the shadowy trees. Once for an instant he thought he saw them, but the swift-moving forms which he glimpsed were a troop of deer, crossing his trail from the left, running fast, their white tails erect, as though something had frightened them. Almayne bore to the right and ran on without pause. A quarter of a mile more and he saw ahead of him down the wooded slope the dark green of the canes.

For an hour he lay in the canebrake, brooding over the blow that had fallen. Little Tlutlu was lost to him. The pack ponies were lost. Their rich cargo of beaver pelts, for which he had traveled to the country of the Chicasaws beyond the Blue Mountains, would be carried to the lodges of the Iroquois and bartered finally to the traders of Canada or New York. Presently he smiled a wry smile.

"Old Julah was right," he said to himself. "The evil came quickly."

When he judged it safe to move, he rose and for a mile followed a deer path winding through the canebrake parallel with the creek. Then he turned to the left along another deer path and, emerging from the canes, set off westward through the forest.

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 It was perhaps three hours later when his quick eye caught a slight movement amid the tree trunks ahead. Next moment a huge yellow-brown bulk heaved upward from the ground, a giant bull elk with vast, wide-spreading antlers.

Almayne stood rigid with amazement. The thing seemed too strange to be true; yet he knew that it was true, for he did not believe that there was another elk like this one in the whole wilderness of America.

"Awi Agwa!" he murmured. "The bull of Sani' gilagi!"

It was a long shot, a very long shot for the rifle of those days, a marvelously accurate weapon but of comparatively short range. Almayne knew that the elk had seen him but that the animal, puzzled by his immobility, was not sure of what he was. He raised the rifle so slowly that the great bull watching him in the middle distance could not detect the movement. He aimed long and carefully, calculating the necessary elevation, figuring the force of the wind.

At the report the elk plunged forward, wheeled and galloped straight away from the hunter. Almayne had not followed the trail fifty yards when he found what he expected to find—a blotch of blood upon the fallen leaves.

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 That was a winter long remembered in the Cherokee mountain towns. Some named it the Winter of the Unending Snow; others recalled it as the Winter of the Wolves. With the first light snowfall in mid-autumn the wolf invasion began; such wolves and such wolf packs as had never before been known in the Overhills. All that white winter, that winter of pitiless Arctic cold, they harried the deer of the mountain woods, and more than once, when hunger had maddened them and the odds were in their favor, they took human prey. It was their fangs that tore the life out of Dagantu, that tall war captain of the Cherokees, who met his end in a dark gap of the mountains, known ever afterwards as the Defile of Waya, the Defile of the Wolves.

The first snow of that winter—or, rather, of that autumn, for it was early October—fell upon Awi Agwa, the great bull elk, not more than an hour after Almayne had wounded him. Awi Agwa was unaware of the falling flakes which melted as quickly as they fell. He was mad with the pain which had stabbed him suddenly in his right shoulder, the pain which now stabbed him at every stride. Almayne, plodding onward through the forest, three miles behind the elk, frowned as the light rain, which had been falling for half an hour, turned suddenly white. If the snowfall continued tracking

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 would be impossible; and Almayne had set himself the task of tracking this elk down.

Outwardly he scoffed at Julah's warning of a curse, but like many of the frontier hunters he had a secret respect for the lore of the red shamans and conjurers. The evil which Julah had predicted had come with impressive swiftness: at one stroke Almayne had lost his horse, his pack ponies and his beaver pelts. Julah had seemed to expect that the giant elk would show himself again; and, most strangely, Almayne had encountered the animal at least sixty miles from Sani'gilagi where he had seen the great bull for the first time. This was an astonishing confirmation of the old Indian's prophecy. It would be as well, Almayne felt, to kill this elk, this Awi Agwa, as Julah had advised; and since the animal was wounded, the task might not be hard.

Awi Agwa traveled northwestward. Of all the deer kind, the elk when frightened is the swiftest, the most enduring. The roar of Almayne's rifle that first morning on Sani'gilagi had started the giant bull on a journey which lasted for hours and which brought him down from the mountains into the upper foothills. It was the season of mating. He had left his own cows on Sani'gilagi; so in search of other cows Awi Agwa had ranged far and wide through the foothills until a rifle had roared again and a bullet had plowed its way deep into his right

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 shoulder. The mountains were his home, and now he turned back to them. Fleeing from this new danger, he struck northwestward once more.

All that afternoon he traveled. At first his gait was a Swinging trot faster than the trot of a horse. But at every step pain racked his wounded shoulder, and soon the trot became a walk. Yet, even walking, he traveled fast. Almayne, studying the tracks—the snowfall had lasted less than half an hour—saw that the elk had changed his gait and felt more confident than ever that the chase would not be a long one. He found no more blood on the trail, and abandoned hope of overtaking his quarry before nightfall. But Awi Agwa, he thought, would hardly travel throughout the night. Not knowing that he was pursued, sooner or later the elk would lie down to rest, and when he rose to continue his journey the wounded shoulder would have stiffened.

Well after nightfall he lay down. Before dawn he rose, staggered, stood swaying precariously. He had forgotten his wound, for the pain had all but vanished. But the moment he stood on his legs, it stabbed him again, and when he tried to walk he found that he could barely move his right foreleg.

Sudden panic seized him. Without stopping to feed, he set off northwestward. For a while he hobbled and stumbled as though his foreleg were broken, but gradually, although the stabs of pain

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 continued with each stride, his pace became faster, his gait less labored. When, hours later, Almayne reached the spot where the elk had bedded and studied the tracks beyond it, the hunter read in those tracks the story of a long bitter struggle, a struggle with pain and with paralysis worse than pain, a struggle in which Awi Agwa had won.

It was early in the forenoon of the second day that Awi Agwa learned that he was pursued. From far behind him came a sound which he recognized at once—the dull boom of a distant rifle. Almayne, who had breakfasted only on some parched corn which he carried in a small bag attached to his belt, had shot a wild turkey to satisfy his appetite. The big bird, perched on an oak limb almost directly over his head, had tempted him irresistibly and he had killed it regardless of the possibility that the elk might hear the shot.

Awi Agwa heard and understood—knew that his enemy was on his trail. He had halted to graze on certain succulent weeds carpeting the ground in a grove of huge beeches. He had pulled scarcely a dozen mouthfuls when the far-off boom of the rifle reached him; and instantly his antlered head jerked upward and he lurched forward in the slashing gallop which is the elk's fastest gait.

It was a rash effort. At the first plunge intolerable pain shot through his wounded shoulder, his

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 right foreleg doubled under him and he fell. He was up again in an instant, but the fall had reopened his wound and now a stream of blood trickled down his leg.

Again he settled to the stiff-legged walk which was the only gait allowed him by his injured shoulder. He had traveled perhaps three miles farther when he heard another sound behind him, the hunting cry of a wolf pack, a pack which had smelled blood. This time Awi Agwa failed to understand. He knew wolves and did not fear them; and neither instinct nor reason told him that the blood which these gray hunters scented was his own. Nor could he know that these wolves were of a kind that he had never seen before—the vanguard of that army of grim, gaunt, long-fanged killers who were to sweep down upon the Overhills that winter from the Northern forests already deep in ice and snow.

Nearer and nearer came the savage wailing chorus. Awi Agwa passed now through an empty forest, a forest which seemed lifeless and deserted because the deer which peopled it had disappeared. He saw no more herds of whitetails grazing in the forest glades; and he knew that the deer, smaller and far less formidable than himself, had scattered to right and left out of the path of the approaching pack. For half a mile he came upon no living thing except the common birds of the woods. Then, fifty

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 yards ahead of him and to his left, he noticed a small black bear sitting on his haunches, his head cocked on one side, listening.

By now, the wolf chorus filled the woods. The bear ambled quickly to the foot of a young hickory and began to climb. Yet not until the danger was almost upon him did Awi Agwa realize that he faced a battle.

He faced it confidently. The wolves of the Overhills had never molested him seriously, and though he had never seen a wolf pack as large as this one, he did not expect a determined attack. It was fortunate for him that the crisis came when it did. He turned at bay in a narrow rock-bound pocket of a hillside where his rear was safe. He might have traveled twenty miles through the foothills without finding another spot so well adapted to his need; and he knew as he waited that with his wide-spreading antlers and flint-edged hoofs guarding his front and flanks, these wolves must be bold indeed to press the assault home.

He did not know or did not realize that a wolf's eye is marvelously quick to detect a wounded animal and to appraise the extent of its wound—that, as he stood at bay, his right foreleg dangled as though it were broken and that it was caked with blood. They paused in front of him for a moment; twenty-one gray, gaunt, shaggy brutes, grimly silent

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 now, red tongues lolling between long white fangs. Then, at their leader's signal, they charged.

Luck was with Awi Agwa. A loose stone slipped under the hind foot of the foremost wolf, and his leap fell short. For a fraction of a second he reared on his hind legs directly in front of the elk's lowered head, and in that fraction of a second Awi Agwa's long forward-pointing pikes ripped into him behind the ribs and disembowelled him. In an instant the thing was done; and in another instant the elk's heavy many-spiked antlers swinging to right and left crashed down upon the wolves leaping at his throat from both sides.

In the swollen shaggy neck of the giant bull there was vast power. His huge antlers, six feet long, extraordinarily massive, bristling with polished sharp-pointed tines, would have seemed to the eye of a man unwieldy weapons; but in Awi Agwa there was strength enough to wield them, and he wielded them not only with strength but with instinctive skill. And again luck played a part. In that mad whirling mêlée he could not always aim his blows but struck more or less blindly; and it was mainly chance which brought the beam of a descending antler squarely down upon the back of a she-wolf's neck just behind the skull.

She staggered ten steps and stood swaying, legs wide apart. Suddenly she lifted her head and

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 howled—a wild quavering cry of agony. In an instant the milling gray mob around Awi Agwa melted as every wolf leaped clear. For some seconds they stood watching the she-wolf, long white teeth gleaming in snarling jaws, eyes aglitter with savage expectation. Then, apparently for the first time, they saw the dying beast that Awi Agwa had disembowelled dragging himself across the ground fifteen feet to the right.

Three of them made a rush for him, but the rest still waited as though transfixed, their pitiless eyes fixed upon the she-wolf which had uttered that quavering howl. She stood motionless except for the slight swaying of her body; but suddenly she lurched forward and began to run in circles, her head bent sharply to one side. Round and round she ran, faster and faster, the fierce expectant eyes following her with strange intensity. Then down she went as though a shot had bowled her over, and in an instant a dozen sets of fangs were rending her carcass.

Awi Agwa, motionless in his tracks, watched the bloody orgy. Instinct kept him where he was, warned him not to leave his position of vantage in the shallow pocket of the hillside. For more than an hour after the feast was over he still stood there facing his foes, while they sat on their haunches in a semi-circle in front of him, unwilling to attack

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 again now that their hunger was somewhat appeased, yet unwilling also to abandon their prey. Finally a troop of deer approaching from the windward quarter passed within fifty yards before scenting the waiting wolves. In this troop was a doe whose haunch had been badly raked and wrenched by a puma the day before. When the deer, scenting danger at last, wheeled and ran, this doe dropped a little behind.

The siege ended then. Here was game which could be caught after a short chase and which could be pulled down without a battle. Every wolf leaped away in pursuit, and they were scarcely out of sight when Awi Agwa resumed his journey. Even in the excitement of the combat with the pack he had not forgotten the more dreaded enemy before whom, in blind obedience to instinct, he was fleeing towards the mountains.

Almayne had halted to roast and eat some of the breast-meat of the gobbler which he had shot. It was afternoon when he reached the place where Awi Agwa had made his stand. The trampled ground, the blood-spattered litter of leaves, the mangled remnants of the two wolves which the rest of the pack had eaten told the hunter what had happened.

He examined the ground carefully and worked

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 out to his own satisfaction the details of the battle which had raged there; but what interested him most at the moment was the freshness of Awi Agwa's tracks leading away from the place. Those tracks, he decided, were less than an hour old. With his crippled shoulder hampering his stride the elk could travel, Almayne believed, no faster than he himself could walk. Shouldering his rifle, the tall hunter strode onward, his thoughtful eyes studying the trail.

In the valley of Sequilla, in the shadow of Sani'gilagi, there was a village of the Cherokees. A chief lived there, one Nunda the Moon-Face, who had a roan horse which Almayne coveted. Nunda would sell this stallion if he could get his price; and now that Tlutlu the Martin-bird was lost to him, Almayne wished to bargain for Nunda's roan.

Yet he did not, as he had planned, go straight to Nunda's village. For fifty miles through the foothills Awi Agwa had led him in the direction of the Indian town; but by noon of the third day, when he was in the foothills no longer but well up among the spurs of the Cowees, Almayne realized that he must choose one of two paths. Down the ridge to the west was the way to Nunda's town. Up the ridge and due north went Awi Agwa's trail, heading

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 evidently for the high humped shoulder of Sani'gilagi itself.

Almayne postponed his choice until he had come to the parting of the ways, debating the question in his mind; but in reality his decision was never in doubt. It was not so much old Julah's warning that now urged him on—though this, too, played a part—as it was his own pride, his self-esteem as a woodsman. This elk had fooled him; the chase had been much longer than he had anticipated. He was on his mettle now. He would follow this trail to its end no matter how far it might lead him; and he was sure that it would not lead him much farther.

He realized now that from the beginning of the chase the elk had been heading for Sani'gilagi, the mountain where Almayne had first seen him and which was evidently his home. Knowing the ways of elk, the hunter was confident that on Sani'gilagi Awi Agwa's flight would end. There the great bull would lie down at last to recoup his strength and give his wounded shoulder time to heal; and there Almayne's opportunity would come.

The hunter swung on up the ridge, his alert eyes searching the sun-speckled vistas ahead. Although he considered it almost certain that Awi Agwa would climb Sani'gilagi before he rested, it was pos-

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 sible that the elk would choose a bed on the lower slopes.

Almayne was right in regarding this as only a possibility. For more than three years Awi Agwa had found sanctuary on Sani'gilagi's summit. The Cherokees held the mountain sacred because it was a favorite seat of the lightning god and a resort of Tsulkalu, the Slant-Eye, the mythic Master of Game. There was no tribal law against it, yet they seldom hunted on the higher slopes. Hence 'throughout the summers and the early months of fall Awi Agwa had made Sani'gilagi his stronghold and, so long as he kept to the upper heights, had been unmolested by the red hunters.

It was this refuge which he was now seeking. Once, it was true, an enemy had invaded it, but only once; and a hundred times in the past, when Cherokee bowmen had picked up his trail in the lower valleys, he had found safety by heading for the mountain's summit. Instinct told him that he was pursued, that the enemy who had wounded him still followed his trail. He was tired, desperately tired, and his wounded shoulder throbbed and burned; but he knew that by swinging around the precipitous eastern face of the mountain and ascending the more gradual western slope, he could reach the lofty refuge which was his goal.

Nevertheless, the long climb taxed him sorely.

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 On the steep ascents his shoulder ached intolerably and grew strangely stiff again. It was mid-afternoon when he reached the upper end of the tributary ridge and faced the short but still steeper climb to the little grassy plateau above the great precipice; and by that time Almayne was less than a mile behind him.

Yet as the danger behind grew more imminent, recollection of it dimmed in the giant bull's mind. Something else had happened to make him forget, or almost forget, the pursuer before whom he had fled for more than fifty miles.

Half way up the ridge he had crossed the trail of an elk herd. They were his own cows, he knew, the cows which he had abandoned temporarily when Almayne's rifle shot on that first day had sent him racing away in terror to the foothills. He had paused only a moment or two to sniff at the day old tracks, but he had learned, either by sight or scent, that among them was a track which should not have been there—the track of an interloper, a rival bull.

Sudden fury swelled up in him. Thenceforward it was not his fear of the hunter that drove him on. On the heights above him there was another enemy—a usurper to be met and punished.

Two hours before sunset Awi Agwa, toiling up the northern slope of the mountain, reached the

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 high meadow on the main ridge of Sani'gilagi close to the summit. Before him opened a small grassy plateau, almost circular in shape. On three sides rocks and trees enclosed the place; but to the south the mountainside dropped almost sheer, forming the profoundest precipice of the Cowees. In this lofty pasture poised upon the brink of the vast cliff, Awi Agwa expected to find his cows; and there he found them.

They were there, all eight of them, five of them lying down near the middle of the meadow, the others cropping the grass nearby. Awi Agwa wasted only one glance upon them. At the farther edge of the plateau, on the very verge of the precipice, a wide-antlered bull elk stood gazing out over the panorama of purple hills and valleys spread below him.

Two hundred yards down the wooded western slope Almayne, following in his quarry's tracks, heard Awi Agwa's furious bugling challenge. The elk cows heard it and raised their heads eagerly, their big ears pricked forward. The stalwart bull that was now master of the herd—the usurper that stood in Awi Agwa's look-out place on the precipice's brow—heard it and whirled to meet the danger.

What he saw chilled his blood. The king had come back, the giant elk whose herd he had stolen,

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 the huge bull that had lorded it over all the other bulls of the Cowees and whose mastery no other bull had dared dispute. He had come back to claim his own; and now he was striding across the open, jaws champing, antlers tossing, eyes red with the frenzy of battle. Panic gripped the usurper. He stood rigid, staring wildly. In another moment he would have turned to run.

In that moment something happened. Suddenly Awi Agwa staggered, halted, stood swaying uncertainly. The last stiff climb up the steep western slope to the plateau had all but exhausted the wounded bull, and now the world went black before him. Almost at once the faintness passed and his vision cleared. But the sharp eyes of the other bull had seen, his cunning brain had understood.

Almayne, half-striding, half-running up the steep mountain side, heard another bugle call above him, a challenge shriller than Awi Agwa's fierce blast but no less angry, no less defiant. A sudden light flared in the hunter's eager eyes. He knew that in the high meadow on the brow of the precipice he would find Awi Agwa in combat with a rival; and he knew that in the fury of battle his victim would be oblivious to all other dangers.

The long hunt was nearly over. The great bull elk of Sani'gilagi had reached his journey's end.

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 They met almost in the center of the little plateau, met with a resounding clash of antlers which startled the rabbits among the rocks along the meadow's rim. To an onlooker at that moment it would have seemed an unequal battle; for although the usurper was a bull of powerful build and more than normal stature, Awi Agwa was by far the taller and heavier, while his huge antlers dwarfed those of his opponent. Yet a keen-eyed observer would have perceived quickly that in this duel bulk of body and spread of horns were not the only factors.

Unwounded, his powers unimpaired, Awi Agwa would have borne his enemy off his feet in that first charge. As it was, the shock of collision brought triumph to neither side. With Awi Agwa rested the advantage, but it was not decisive.

The usurper was forced back upon his haunches; but he checked the other's onset, recovered himself quickly, held Awi Agwa's antlers in play so that the long prongs could not gore his flanks. Already the usurper knew that he had not ventured too rashly in giving battle to this half-crippled giant. The first shock had given him the measure of Awi Agwa's strength, and now he was not afraid.

Heads down, mouths lolling open and wickedly leering, antlers clashing and grinding, they strove with the fury of demons. For a time Awi Agwa forced his opponent slowly backward. The great

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 muscles of his forelegs and of his sleek haunches bulged and writhed; in his injured shoulder the torn sinews throbbed with pain which lashed him to frenzy. More maddening even than the pain was the astounding, infuriating fact of failure, failure to overwhelm this rival in the first onset.

Not for years had any bull stood up so long against him. For the first time since the far away days of his youth Awi Agwa's colossal bulk and might had failed to conquer quickly.

It was this that drove him almost insane with rage. Into this first stage of the battle the giant elk threw all the strength he had. Hampered by his hurt shoulder, by the exhaustion resulting from his long journey, he could not overthrow his enemy; but for many minutes he forced the fighting, pushing his opponent backward, lunging and stabbing, twisting his hairy neck, swinging his huge antlers to right and left as he strove to get past his opponent's guard and deliver the swift ripping thrust in the flank which would have ended the fight.

Neither bull knew that the elk cows, which at first had watched the duel with excited interest, were watching it no longer; that suddenly one of them had lifted her head, sniffed the air and galloped off to the right, followed by all the rest. Neither bull was aware of the tall buckskin-clad shape which slipped from tree to tree at the north-

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 ern edge of the meadow, then boldly darted across the open to an isolated rock scarcely thirty yards from the spot where the combat raged. Neither bull saw the black barrel of the long rifle which was presently thrust out from behind that rock.

Again and again Almayne drew his bead. The tide of battle had turned. Awi Agwa's strength was waning now. He forced the fighting no longer. He stood still, head down, legs braced, holding back his enemy by weight rather than muscle. Calmly, unhurriedly Almayne drew his bead again, lining his sights on the spot behind Awi Agwa's shoulder through which a bullet would plunge straight to the heart.

Yet for a little while longer the hunter delayed the fatal shot. This was a wilderness battle such as few men had ever witnessed. He was unwilling to end it before he must.

A minute the combatants stood motionless, head to head, their antlers interlaced. Then suddenly the usurper launched his attack. He had been glad to rest for a while to recover his wind. Now, knowing that his opponent was done, he would make an end. His swollen neck twisting and writhing, his antlers grinding against those of his adversary, his champing jaws dripping foam, he drove forward with all his strength.

Almayne, his finger crooked about the trigger,

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 saw Awi Agwa's muscles bulge and strain, saw him rally his remaining strength for a supreme effort, saw that effort fail.

It was a heroic, a heart-breaking effort. Never before in all the years of his kingship had Awi Agwa given ground before a rival bull. He could not realize that he must give ground now. With all the strength that was left to him he struggled against fate.

But at last came the inevitable. For a longer time than Almayne had believed possible the wounded bull held his own; then slowly, foot by foot, he was forced back. More desperately than ever he strained and struggled, but he could not check his adversary's slow, relentless advance.

Almayne knew that now the end was near. Awi Agwa was too far spent to escape by flight. Within a few minutes the powerful twists and thrusts of his enemy's neck would throw him sideways to be gored to death by the merciless raking stabs of the usurper's horns.

Those horns, slashing and ripping Awi Agwa's flanks, would spoil the giant elk's hide—an elk hide which, because of its astonishing size, would help buy Nunda's stallion. Almayne realized that he could risk no further delay. Again he raised his rifle slowly to draw another bead. Again his sights were lined on the spot above Awi Agwa's heart.

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 The spot moved as Awi Agwa gave backward. Almayne no longer had a stationary target. Awi Agwa, head to head with his foe, was retreating more rapidly, moving steadily backward, keeping his opponent's antlers within the guard of his own, but no longer trying to hold his ground. The hunter shifted the rifle to readjust his aim, but now the giant elk had swung a little to the right and no vital spot was exposed.

Almayne, still holding the rifle at his shoulder, awaited his opportunity; and suddenly, as he waited, he understood.

Awi Agwa was beaten—beaten for the first time in his life—beaten because he had entered this battle crippled and weary, a mere shadow of himself. But his was not to be the ignominious fate of the defeated monarch. He would not die under the horns and hoofs of his conqueror, trampled to nothingness in the dust.

Perhaps, as Almayne believed, he made his choice deliberately. Perhaps he was too dazed and spent to know what he was doing. At any rate, he no longer circled the meadow as he gave ground before his enemy. Instead, he backed straight towards the precipice's rim.

Almayne leaped to his feet, flung the rifle again to his shoulder. There was no time now for a deliberate aim. Head to head, the two battling

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 bulls moved towards the brink of the cliff, the usurper pushing his antagonist before him. Another minute and Awi Agwa would plunge backward over that brink to fall five hundred feet upon the jagged rocks below.

A golden eagle, circling above Sani'gilagi's summit, dodged in the air as the dull boom of the rifle came to him.

Almayne stood erect, a tall yellow-brown figure in his stained buckskins, the lowered rifle balanced in his left hand. Fifteen feet from the rim of the precipice lay the usurper's body. Almayne's bullet, ranging forward under the ribs, had pierced the animal's heart. Just beyond the carcass of his fallen rival, his back to the cliff's edge, stood Awi Agwa.

Legs wide apart, his huge bulk swaying from side to side, his head hanging low as though he no longer had strength to support his mighty antlers, the giant elk gazed dully at the hunter. If his ears had heard the rifle shot, it meant nothing to him in that moment of immeasurable weariness. He knew only that suddenly his enemy had fallen at his feet, that in the instant of disaster victory had come.

Presently he lurched forward and thrust weakly with his sharp brow prongs at the body of his foe. Then, with something of his old pride, he lifted his head again. His throat swelled with the bugle call

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 of triumph; but so faint was the sound that Almayne could scarcely hear it.

Once more Awi Agwa thrust at his dead enemy. Then suddenly he seemed to become aware of the hunter standing in full view not thirty yards away. The giant bull turned and walked slowly across the meadow towards the woods beyond. He did not see Almayne raise his right hand above his head in the stately Cherokee gesture of farewell.

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EARS ago the lumbermen had spread their blight over Tiger Swamp. That blight would be long in passing. Not for cen turies, if ever again, would the swamp be what it was before the axmen's coming. The towering straight-trunked cypresses were gone; gone, too, were the mighty pines which once grew all along the swamp's edges, pines which soared seventy feet without a limb. But the place was green again, the scars that had disfigured it were no longer visible. In fact, it was greener than it had ever been in its prime, for now that the great trees which had shaded it were no more, undergrowths of a dozen different kinds could find the sunlight which they needed.

Out of these undergrowths which had come into being since the murder of the trees, out of thickets of myrtle and bay and tangles of blackberry and Cherokee rose, wild nature laughed at the mastery of Man. He had despoiled her, had he? He had slaughtered her noblest trees and swept away the virgin forest which she had created through long

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 ages in this place? Yes, he had done these things. But in doing them he had merely made Tiger Swamp a suitable habitation for her, a place of abundant coverts and green, impenetrable refuges where the wildest of her wild creatures could find sanctuary.

And not sanctuary only. The swamp was a fortress as well as a retreat. From its edges hostile invisible eyes looked out at hunters who came to the swamp's margins in search of game; and from its recesses, under cover of night, those of its inhabitants who knew how to wage war in the secret, furtive way of the wild killers launched raids and forays against the neighboring farms.

On a low pine stump near the western edge of Tiger Swamp sat a tall, dun shape, a shape as motionless as the stump of which it might have been a part. It had been there for more than half an hour; it had seen and heard many things; but as yet it had neither seen nor heard the two things which would have interested it most.

It did not know that two pairs of eyes were fixed upon it, that one of those pairs of eyes had never wavered in their gaze since the moment when they had seen this tall, dun shape steal cautiously through the sparse grove of second-growth oaks and sweet gums which bordered the swamp at this point

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 and take its seat on a certain low pine stump fifty yards from the swamp's margin.

Sandy Jim Mayfield believed in luck. Above all, he believed in the luck of lucky places. Sitting on this stump, he had killed the greatest gobbler that had ever fallen to his gun. Sitting on this stump, he had shot down not his biggest buck but the buck whose antlers were the finest of the sixty pairs of deer horns bristling on the walls of his cabin. Spring hunting—and it was now mid-April—called for as little expenditure of energy as possible. Sandy Jim, lazy with the languor of spring, had left his dogs at home and had walked across a mile of lonely pineland straight to the old pine stump near the swamp's edge.

There the old woodsman would sit till dusk, if necessary, his loaded double-barreled gun resting across his knees, his white head dropped forward a little between his square, high shoulders. If a deer or a turkey came to him there, its doom would be sealed. Being a believer in luck and more particularly in the luck of this spot, and knowing deer and turkeys as he did, Sandy Jim thought it more than likely that some time during the long afternoon a deer or a turkey would come.

He waited, therefore, patiently and hopefully, basking in the warm April sunshine, hearing and yet not hearing the songs of the nesting birds,

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 drowsy yet alert, indifferent yet eager, listening and watching silently, never suspecting that he himself was watched.

Of the two pairs of unseen eyes that were fixed upon him, one pair, gazing out from the edge of a small myrtle thicket between the hunter and the fringe of short canes along the swamp's margin, never strayed from the motionless dull-brown shape which had taken its station on the pine stump. To the owner of those eyes that dun figure had become, from the moment of its appearance on the scene, the most important and the most hated thing in the visible world.

Until that figure had appeared, the watchful eyes in the myrtle thicket had seen and taken note of many things—towhee buntings and brown thrashers scratching amid the fallen leaves, a gray squirrel moving about the branches of a sweet gum, a big red-crested logcock hammering on a dead pine sapling a little way up the slope. But now all these were forgotten. The eyes in the myrtle thicket no longer saw them. They saw only the form of the hunter, motionless, silent, as inconspicuous in its brown corduroys as the stump itself; and they saw him with fear and hatred, with hatred which was perhaps even more potent than their fear. If the eyes in the myrtle thicket had possessed the dread power which the ancients attributed to that

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 fabled beast, the basilisk, Mayfield would have died speedily on his stump, the life burnt out of him by the intensity of their gaze.

The other pair of watching eyes, concealed in a clump of broom grass about fifteen feet from the myrtle thicket, were not less alert, not less observant, not less hostile. But they were not so intense, not so fixed and steady. There crept into them now and then an expression which might have denoted both impatience and expectancy. Unlike the eyes in the myrtle thicket, their gaze was not immovably fastened upon the hunter. From time to time they seemed to forget him momentarily, and at such times they searched eagerly all the open spaces of the wood within range of their vision.

Evidently, to the owner of these eyes, the dun form which had suddenly appeared on the pine stump was not the only thing that mattered. There were other things, other possibilities to be remembered and to be watched for. The owner of these eyes, one might have guessed, though keenly interested in watching and studying the strange still shape on the pine stump, was at the same time awaiting with growing impatience some tremendously important event which was due to happen soon.

If Mayfield had suddenly divined the nature of that expected event, if he had become aware

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 through some mysterious sixth sense, of the hidden hostile eyes regarding him from the myrtle thicket in front of him and from the broom grass clump in front and a little to his left, he would not have betrayed his knowledge by any hasty movement.

Probably his own small, gray-blue eyes, which were now rather dull and heavy because he was drowsy, would have brightened suddenly. Probably his brown, leathery, hawk-like face beneath its thatch of white hair would have become even more hawk-like, because in moments of excitement the old hunter had a trick of contracting his nostrils in a way which made his thin, hooked nose look more than ever like a falcon's beak. But he would not have been startled into any sudden motion; he would not have altered in the slightest degree the waiting game that he was playing. He would have figured the chances with lightning-like rapidity, for in problems of this sort his mind was marvelously quick; and he would have decided accurately that his best chance lay in remaining precisely where he was and in doing exactly what he was doing—namely, nothing.

But no mysterious knowledge of those two pairs of watching, inimical eyes came to Sandy Jim as he drowsed in the April sunlight; and no sixth sense warned him when to the eyes already watching

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 from concealment there was added yet another pair of hostile orbs.

The eyes that watched from the myrtle thicket and from the broom grass were in front of him, between his pine stump and the swamp. This third pair of eyes which had now come to play a part in the drama watched him from behind.

From the high land to the swamp-edge the ground sloped gently, and Mayfield's stump was about half way down the slope. On the slope itself the trees were mostly second-growth, but just at the crest of the rise, some forty yards from the pine stump, stood an enormous black oak behind whose huge trunk even the mightiest of wild beasts or the burliest of human killers might have lurked unseen. It was from the ambush of this gigantic black oak trunk that this third pair of eyes now studied Mayfield's motionless form as the old hunter sat waiting, with that long patience which the forest teaches, for the deer or the turkey whose coming he expected.

The eyes that watched from behind the black oak trunk were less intense, perhaps, than those that watched from the myrtle thicket. But they were far more formidable. There was no fear in them. Instead they were aglitter with triumph more menacing and more sinister than hatred. They were like the eyes of one, whether beast or man, who sees

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 his enemy at last in his power—like the eyes of an avenger to whom has come, after long waiting, the yearned for opportunity to strike his foeman down.

These eyes that lurked in the ambush of the black oak trunk were larger than the eyes that watched from the myrtle thicket, smaller than the eyes that watched from the clump of broom grass; and despite the glitter of triumph in them, they were as cold and gray as polished stone. They were eyes that could wait—that could wait and watch with inexhaustible patience until their moment had come.

They would never grow weary, these eyes. Fate or chance had set an ambuscade in the woods, and one whom these eyes hated had entered that ambuscade. Soon or late the trap would be sprung. Hours might pass before the dun figure on the pine stump made the fatal move to which the eyes of stone looked forward with grim, avid expectation. But hour after hour they would await the coming of that moment. Hour after hour they would watch from their ambush, confident of triumph at the last, sure of the revenge which they desired.

The slow minutes dragged their length along. To Sandy Jim Mayfield came no premonition of peril, no subtle hint of impending tragedy. He was not the kind to whom mysterious warnings come, conveyed by influences or forces beyond human com-

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 prehension. He had only his physical senses to rely upon, and these gave him no warning. For all his seventy years, his vision was keener than that of most young men, his hearing as acute as it had ever been. But the keenest eyes cannot see that which is invisible; the sharpest ears cannot detect a presence which makes no sound.

No sound came from the myrtle thicket, from the tall broom grass waving gently in the light breeze, from the great black oak trunk at the crest of the slope. Even the smaller folk of the woods seemed unaware of hidden presences in two of these three hiding places. A wren perched on a twig of the myrtle not six inches from the ground and sang for a quarter of an hour with scarcely a pause for breath. A cottontail came out of the swamp and nibbled contentedly at certain appetizing weed stems at the very verge of the broom grass clump. But no bird or little beast ventured close to the black oak trunk forty yards behind the stump where Mayfield sat; and a big iron-gray fox squirrel, which had been exploring the branches of the oak, now lay flattened against an upper limb, staring glassily downward, afraid to move, almost afraid to breathe.

An hour passed. It was now mid-afternoon. The dun figure on the pine stump still held almost exactly the same pose, except that the white head

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 under the battered brown felt hat no longer sagged forward sleepily. But if Mayfield's drowsiness had disappeared, there was no hint of restlessness or impatience in his attitude. As the afternoon waned the prospect of a turkey would grow less, but the prospect of a deer would improve. Most of the turkey hens were now setting, and the gobblers would seek their roosts well before sunset. But in spring, when the law forbade deer hunting, the whitetail bucks and does soon learned that they need not wait till nightfall to begin feeding. As the shadows lengthened, old Sandy Jim would watch the swamp-edge in front of him with growing expectancy in the hope that out of the fringe of short, dense canes a buck or a doe would come to face his gun—a gun to which the law meant nothing.

Of the three pairs of hostile eyes watching the dun figure of the hunter, two seemed as insensible as Mayfield himself to the passage of time. The eyes in the myrtle thicket had, perhaps, lost something of their intensity, but they never wavered in their fixed, inscrutable stare. The eyes behind the black oak trunk—those eyes which had the hardness and the eternal quality of stone—still glittered with that grim confidence, that ominous assurance of triumph which had shone in them from the beginning. But the eyes in the clump of broom grass

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 —the large eyes which all the while had seemed to be awaiting some eagerly desired event—appeared to have lost interest in the motionless figure on the pine stump.

Only occasionally did these eyes return to the hunter's form. In general their gaze roved restlessly here and there, as though searching for something as yet invisible; and more evident than ever now was that look of eagerness, of anxious expectancy, of hungry, desperate yearning for some happening long overdue.

Mayfield, had he now discovered the eyes in the broom grass clump, would not have failed to read their message correctly. He would have known precisely what it was that the owner of those eyes expected; and his own eyes, deep-set, almost hidden under white overhanging brows, would have become on the instant even more alert, even more watchful. Perhaps, reading that warning, he would have moved his right hand very slowly and cocked the right barrel of his old-fashioned hammer gun.

But the eyes in the broom grass clump remained invisible to the hunter; their warning message was not read; the gun rested across Mayfield's knees uncocked, its hammers down. Mayfield could not know that presently there would come a moment

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 when his failure to cock that gun would be regretted bitterly.

Before that moment came, however, there were developments in the drama of which old Sandy Jim, unknown to himself, had become the center—this silent drama of the unseen eyes.

The first of these developments had no apparent starting point, no visible or audible cause. To Sandy Jim's ears no sound had come except the ordinary sounds of the woods—the songs and call notes of small birds, the screaming of a soaring red-shouldered hawk, the cat-like complaining cries of a red-bellied woodpecker somewhere in the swamp. Hence it was not sound which had warned him, if indeed he had received any specific warning. Nor could it have been sight; for while the myrtle thicket and the broom grass clump were in front of him and in plain view, the black oak trunk was directly behind him up the slope and he had never once glanced in that direction.

Nevertheless, the thing which he now did was not purposeless, not accidental. For just before he did it, a change had come over his face, a change so slight as to be scarcely noticeable, yet definite and undoubtedly significant.

Gradually the thin nostrils above the sparse white mustache had contracted and tightened in that odd way which they had in moments of stress,

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 accentuating the hawk-like look of the lean, sun-tanned face; and at the same time a sudden light had flared momentarily in the gray-blue eyes. Then, very slowly, Sandy Jim turned his head.

Very, very slowly he turned it, inch by inch, so that the movement was barely perceptible, at the same time shifting his body slightly: and so—gradually and to all appearances very casually—his gaze described a half-circle, taking in the thinly wooded spaces to the right of him and behind.

At last his eyes rested on the trunk of the great black oak at the crest of the rise. Four feet of solid living oak stood between him and the grim watcher in that ambush; Mayfield's vision could not pierce the opaque wood and see that which lurked behind it. He saw nothing but the tree itself. Yet he looked no farther. As though he had completed his survey of the space behind him and was no longer interested, his eyes traveled somewhat more quickly back across the are of a half-circle and resumed their placid, patient scrutiny of the canes at the edge of the swamp from which he hoped a deer would presently emerge.

He had seen nothing, heard nothing. Yet, studying his deep-set eyes and hawk-like face, one would have guessed that something had been learned—something which stirred Sandy Jim Mayfield with a strange excitement.

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 This, then, was one development in the drama of the unseen eyes. Somehow, though neither sight nor sound had warned him, Mayfield's attention had been drawn to the huge trunk of the black oak on the brow of the slope behind him. As though fate had decided that events should now move swiftly to a crisis, there took place a few minutes afterwards another development in that drama.

To the three pairs of eyes which were watching Sandy Jim where he sat on his pine stump near the margin of the swamp, a fourth pair was added. These eyes were in the swamp itself, or rather just at its edge—in the fringe of short, close-growing canes at which the hunter was gazing. Yet, so dense were the canes, that Mayfield, although he was looking almost directly at the spot, could not see these eyes or the shape to which they belonged.

That shape remained for many minutes absolutely motionless in the cover of the canes while the eyes glared fixedly at the dun figure on the pine stump. They were eyes at once beautiful and terrible but far more terrible than beautiful. They were even more intense than the eyes in the myrtle thicket, even more ruthless than the eyes behind the black oak trunk. They were large, luminous, marvelously bright. Fire burned in them, yellow fire in which green lights glinted. Yet brilliant and piercing as they were, they seemed somehow pale and

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 cold, and they were incalculably cruel. They were eyes that could know no pity, eyes harder than stone or steel, eyes utterly savage, utterly implacable.

For nearly a quarter of an hour they remained fixed upon the form on the pine stump. Mayfield made not the slightest move. He was as still as though the deadly-cold glare of those unseen, unsuspected orbs in the canes had turned his blood to ice. As a matter of fact, he was thinking hard, thinking not about the implacable eyes in the canes—for he was unaware of their existence—but about the thing which lurked in the ambush of the black oak trunk up the slope behind him.

Some men grow restless when their brains work at utmost speed. Mayfield was of another type. In him intense mental concentration was often accompanied by complete physical repose. If throughout his long vigil he had demonstrated his woodsman's faculty of sitting still in one spot, his stillness was now so perfect that he seemed to have become inanimate.

It was this that hastened the crisis. So inanimate did he seem that to one of the four watching him from ambush he became inanimate. The watcher in the myrtle thicket and the watcher in the broom grass had witnessed his coming and therefore were not to be deceived by his present immobility; the stony-eyed watcher behind the

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 black oak trunk could not be deceived. But the watcher in the canes, having just come there from the inner regions of the swamp, had not seen the hunter take his seat on the pine stump; and when after many minutes this watcher had detected not the slightest movement, he concluded that the odd-looking, erect, dun-colored object yonder was a projecting portion of the stump itself.

At last, therefore, the cruel eyes in the canes shifted their gaze. The shape of which they were a part moved silently, sinuously forward. Next moment the canes parted and this shape came out into the open.

Sandy Jim Mayfield saw it instantly. He saw instantly, also, that this shape, this monstrous bay lynx, one of the largest that he had ever seen, had come out of the canes for a very definite purpose. He knew that the lynx's powers of scent are limited, but the whole attitude and behavior of this lynx showed him that it had scented something. His perception of this fact was so instantaneous that he checked by a conscious effort of his will the slight start of surprise which the sudden appearance of the creature had occasioned.

The lynx was advancing almost directly towards him, gliding forward very slowly, its padded feet making no sound, its great bearded face hanging low. For an instant Mayfield considered the pos-

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 sibility that the animal was deliberately advancing upon him. Almost at once, however, he decided that the thing which the tawny killer had scented was between the lynx and himself, that his own scent had not reached the animal's nostrils. His curiosity immediately aroused, he decided to make no move for the present but to await developments.

For the moment he seemed to forget that which watched from the black oak trunk behind him. For the moment his whole attention was concentrated upon the advancing lynx; and it was in this moment that he invoked silent imprecations upon his own head because his gun lay uncocked across his knees, while his hands rested on the stump beside him. He was in plain view of the lynx, but it was evident that his stillness had deceived the animal—as stillness will deceive most wild animals—and that it did not recognize him as a man. It was certain also that even the slight movement necessary to draw back the hammer of the gun would betray him.

Slowly, stealthily the lynx came on. Sandy Jim knew now that the thing which it had scented, the thing which it was stalking, must be hidden at the edge of the myrtle thicket in front of him. He wondered what this thing was, this creature which had lurked so long and so silently under the edge of the myrtles, for he knew that it must have been

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 there throughout his vigil on the pine stump. Among the guesses which he made was one which was correct. But he did not learn this until afterwards; for when it had come within ten feet of the myrtle thicket, the lynx stopped.

Mayfield watched it curiously. He judged that it had heard what he himself had heard—a sound in the swamp beyond the canes, a faint sound but one which set his pulses beating faster. He knew, or thought that he knew, what that sound was; but the lynx was not so sure. It waited motionless, ears flattened, lips drawn back in a snarl, revealing long, thin, white fangs, its round, bearded face turned a little to the right, so that its pale eyes were no longer directed towards the hunter.

For half a minute it stood thus; and in that half-minute Mayfield's lean, long-fingered right hand moved slowly, cautiously and drew back both hammers of his gun.

Sandy Jim's eyes watched the crouching lynx, but his ears were strained to catch again that faint sound which both he and the lynx had heard. In a moment he heard it again, and this time there was no mistaking it.

Other ears heard it also; and the eyes in the broom grass clump—the large, restless eyes which all along had seemed to be waiting for some desired overdue event—brightened suddenly. But Sandy

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 Jim, unaware of the presence of those eyes, knew only that success was about to crown his vigil. A deer was coming out of the swamp, the game for which he had been waiting all the long afternoon.

Slowly he raised his gun until the butt rested against his shoulder. Next moment a whitetail doe stepped into view out of the fringe of canes.

Mayfield drew a careful bead as she came on. His long, brown finger was crooked about the trigger. His thin, keen face, pressed against the gunstock, was the face of a hunting hawk. She was within easy range. He could not miss. But moment followed moment and he did not shoot.

Even as he aimed, even as his finger touched the trigger, his face had gone pale beneath its tan. Suddenly, in the nick of time, his thoughts had leaped back to the black oak trunk on the slope behind him and to that which waited and watched in ambush there.

Squinting along the gun barrel he cursed silently, cursing his own folly with something resembling dismay. For a moment he was shaken. The trap had all but closed upon him. He had been very near to the disaster which he dreaded most.

Very slowly he lowered his gun barrel slightly and sat watching. So gradual was the movement that the doe did not see it, while the head of the

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 crouching lynx was still turned the other way, facing the newcomer. So for a half-minute he waited; and behind the black oak the stern eyes which had been watching there still watched, ablaze now with fierce expectancy, sure that within another fraction of time the trap would be sprung.

Suddenly Mayfield's eyes widened. The doe had given a mighty leap forward. She was flying up the slope now in long bounds, heading straight towards him and straight towards the lynx fifty feet in front of him. Amazed, Mayfield watched her. She must have scented the lynx by now, yet she came straight on. Sandy Jim saw the light in her eyes, the bristling hair on her neck, and in a flash the truth came to him. This doe was a mother racing to the rescue of her fawn.

The lynx crouched midway between the myrtle thicket and the broom grass clump. The doe's last long forward bound carried her to the edge of the broom grass, and for a tenth of a second she paused to nuzzle something that lay hidden there. Then, stiff-legged, her head high, her neck arched, she bounded sideways towards the lynx.

Once Sandy Jim Mayfield had seen a whitetail buck cut a rattlesnake to pieces in the woods. He knew the deadly swiftness of the rattler's stroke, the incredible quickness with which that spear-shaped head could deliver its lethal thrust. But

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 he had learned on that occasion that the rattler's quickness is as nothing compared with the quickness of the whitetail deer and that even the poisoned fangs of the king of serpents cannot avail against the whitetail's flint-edged hoofs.

That had been a great fight. This was to be a longer and a more spectacular one. Again, in his absorption in this lesser drama, Mayfield seemed to forget the drama of which he himself was the center, to forget the ruthless eyes watching from the ambush of the black oak trunk behind him. He sat in plain view on the pine stump, but the combatants were so intent upon their battle that neither saw him. Almost before he knew it the doe leaped to the attack. But all the big cats are marvelously quick, and the bay lynx is quick as light. When the doe's sharp hoofs came down the lynx was not there.

So swiftly that Mayfield's eyes could not follow the motion, the lithe, tawny cat had leaped three feet to the right. Another short leap would have carried him into the myrtle thicket, but, instead, he bounded back into the open. Probably he had not grasped the significance of what was happening. Occasionally some big buck had displayed a certain arrogance towards him, but in general he had found the deer, especially the does, a timid folk. He did not know that a fawn lay hidden in the clump of

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 broom grass; and he had never before fallen foul of a doe defending her young.

In a moment he had cause to regret his rashness. Stiff-legged, prancing daintily like a dancer, the doe circled him while he crouched, snarling, showing all his pointed white teeth, his bristling back bent like a bow, one keen-clawed forepaw lifted, ready to strike. The doe was trying to get behind him, but he turned as she turned, and presently she tired of the delay.

He knew when the blow was coming, but he did not know exactly where. This time the doe seemed to guess the direction in which he would leap to avoid that blow. Suddenly she bounded high, her long slim legs straightened beneath her; and this time, as the lynx leaped from under her, he leaped almost into the path of those descending hoofs and one of them ripped a long gash in his hindquarter.

Snarling with pain and rage, he whirled in the air, his long body bending as though made of rubber. More swiftly than a boxer's fist, his big right paw, bristling with curved retractile claws, swished downward and across, raking the skin from the doe's slim foreleg. It was a powerful blow, and the doe, thrown off her balance, nearly lost her footing. But the wound which the lynx had dealt was slight compared with the one which he had received. His

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 right hindquarter was streaming blood and the pain of it burnt like fire.

That pain took the heart out of him. The doe was circling him again, dancing around him in that odd, mincing, stiff-legged way, head high, ears flattened, tail erect. He saw her muscles tighten, knew that another attack was coming. With one last savage snarl, he sprang six feet to the left and vanished in the myrtle thicket.

Immediately the doe turned, walked to the broom grass clump, and stood with lowered head, caressing her fawn. The large eyes that had watched from the broom grass were no longer urgently, anxiously expectant. They were calm and happy now. The event for which they had been waiting had come at last. The absent mother had returned to her little one.

Mayfield could not see the fawn from where he sat, but minutes ago he had learned from the doe's actions that the little creature was there in the broom grass, that it had been lying there unknown to him all the long afternoon awaiting its mother's return from the swamp where she had gone to graze. There was no sentiment in Sandy Jim. He had killed scores of deer, in season and out. He could kill this one without a twinge of conscience.

He raised the gun slowly. Deliberately he

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24 deposits. The ancient character of these stone implements is made forcibly apparent by many of the older ones being quite honeycombed, rough, and grey, from sheer old age. There could be no better place than this for exemplifying the antiquity of the human race in this part of the world.”

Note 6.—According to Penck and Bruckner the glacial period in Europe covered from half a million to a million and a half years, and was the age of palæolithic implements, painting, and sculpture. There were four intensely cold, with three interglacial period, the last of which was of about one hundred thousand years duration, and in it the loess hunters lived. The carvings of late pleistocene fauna belong to this time, but man was in existence in the second interglacial period, as bouchers, the crudest form of stone implements, have been found in débris of that date. Penck maintains that pottery first appears in the neolithic period, which followed the melting away of the last sheet of ice. The writers upon this subject are very numerous, but nothing that can absolutely be relied on as incontrovertible has yet been established. Some, for instance, maintain that there were as many as six interglacial periods, others that there was only one. Penck's statement that pottery is first found in neolithic deposits does not apply to South Africa, for here, though in a very crude state, it is associated with palaeolithic implements. As to the cause of an ice age, the theory of Croll, worked out by the eminent astronomer Sir Robert Ball, that it was due to greater eccentricity of the earth's orbit, once generally accepted, is now as generally discarded, though nothing as plausible has been substituted for it.


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 sighted, aiming at a point just behind the doe's shoulder. Longingly, lovingly his finger caressed the trigger. Into the grim eyes watching from the black oak trunk on the slope behind him leaped a light of exultant joy.

A long stalk was over. Sandy Jim Mayfield's fate was about to overtake him at last.

Two minutes later Sandy Jim Mayfield reared his long, lank form from the pine stump where he had sat so long and so patiently. He was not in a pleasant mood. To gaze along his gun barrel at that doe and refrain from pulling the trigger had imposed upon him a terrible strain. He had been rash, perhaps, in exposing himself to it, but there had been a reason. The ordeal had lasted nearly a full minute, and it had been almost more than the old hunter could stand. Again and again he had all but pressed the trigger. He had been thankful when at last the doe, having recovered somewhat from the excitement of her battle with the lynx, scented him and made off unwillingly into the swamp.

Sandy Jim walked to the broom grass clump and found the fawn. He searched the ground under the edges of the myrtle thicket and discovered what it was that the lynx had been stalking—a wild turkey hen sitting on her eggs gazing up at him with in

title: Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/98


text: Page:Science and modern civilisation - the Harveian oration - delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1897 (IA b24976039).pdf/37