The Way of the Wild (Sass)/The Quest of the Eagle Stone
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THE dusky marshmen of Odistash have an odd legend about the bald eagle. They say that once in the lifetime of every male eagle, when he has attained the utmost fullness of courage and strength, he sets out on a journey to heaven. Launching forth from his nest in the woods, he circles upward, climbing in a spiral course towards the sky, gliding up and up on wide rigid wings until in a little while even his keen eye can no longer discern the earth beneath him.
Up and up he goes, for days and nights, passing by the moon and the stars, but keeping far from the sun so that his wings will not be burned by the fierce heat; on and on through the immensity of space, until at last, if his strength does not fail, he comes to the place where a Certain One awaits him with the prize which he desires—a stone. Hiding this stone under his feathers, the eagle sets out immediately on his long journey back to earth, and on arriving there conceals the stone in his nest and guards it jealously.
Why the eagle should desire and value this stone from some celestial valley the legend does not explain; but if a man can gain possession of it his fortune is made, for by means of the stone he can open the doors of any money vault or bank in the world. There is one condition, however, which he must observe with the greatest care. After acquiring the Eagle Stone, he must never expose it to the light of day, for if the sun touches it his rays will destroy its magic.
Now the King of Odistash, dozing on his high throne, knew nothing about this legend. His throne was a thousand feet high, and viewed from below, it was blue with buttresses of white; for the king was a big bald eagle, his throne was the sky, and its buttresses were the snowy cumulus cloud-mountains where the thundersqualls were made. In summer and early fall these squalls came crashing down upon the wide sea marshes of Odistash, sometimes forcing the king to take refuge in the thick jungle on the wild barrier island where he had his home. But this was midautumn, and since the squalls seldom came at that season, the king, soaring in the high air, paid no attention to the lightning which flashed and glowed at intervals in a tall thunderhead towering above the billowy cloud ranges to the northward. Round and round he swung, a thousand feet above the marsh plains where white herons stood like images in the shallows, and willets, yellowlegs and clapper rails walked along the muddy margins of the sluggish streams; round and round, in wide interweaving circles, with scarcely a quiver of his black-brown wings, taking his ease in the cool soundless solitude where no living creature dared challenge his supremacy.
He had been soaring thus, more than half asleep, for nearly an hour, when suddenly his lethargy left him. His fierce yellow eyes gleamed under their beetling white brows as he checked his smooth onward course and hung for a moment suspended, his gaze fixed upon one spot in the vast panorama of russet marsh, pale-blue sea and dark-green forest within range of his vision. Then, half closing his wings, he slid swiftly down a sharply inclined plane, the wind whistling past the hard edges of his pinions. Two or three hundred feet above the marsh he extended his wings, swerved to the right, and, beating back against the fresh southwest breeze, began to circle above the actors in the marshland drama which had stirred his interest.
All through the marshes of Odistash wind many tidal creeks, twisting and turning this way and that, dividing into lesser creeks which in turn divide into little marsh brooks, filling with the flood tide which pours in through narrow inlets between the barrier islands, emptying again with the ebb. These waterways teem with life. Into them with the flood tide come the incalculable armies of the mullet; and in pursuit of the mullet armies often come the dolphins, forsaking for the time being the clear water of the ocean along the barrier beaches to follow their favorite prey far up the winding marsh channels until the shoaling water warns them to go no farther lest they be left high and dry by the receding tide.
The eagle, sweeping and swerving in narrow circles three hundred feet in the air, looked straight down upon one of these marsh creeks at a point where a large tributary entered it. The tide was ebbing strongly and the mullet hosts were streaming down with it towards the sea; and in the midst of the mullet hosts three dolphins, swimming nearly abreast, were enjoying good hunting. They had cruised far up the creek with the rising tide and now they were returning seaward with the ebb.
The king had marked their progress up the creek, for, drowsy though he was, there was little that happened on the face of the marshes below him that he did not see; but he had watched them with rather languid interest, for at that time they were hunting in a lazy leisurely fashion which was unlikely to afford him an opportunity to levy tribute. When the tide turned, however, and began to ebb swiftly, bringing down with it the vast hordes of fish which had gone far up the smaller creeks beyond the dolphins' reach, the latter presently changed their tactics. It was this fact that had caught the attention of the soaring eagle and brought him down from his station in the upper air so that he might be ready to take instant advantage of the opportunity which at any moment might be afforded him.
There was every sign that he would not have long to wait. The dolphins, showing six feet or so of their rounded backs above the surface, were charging the flanks of a great army of mullet which filled the wide winding creek from bank to bank and from bend to bend. Dashing at high speed into the shimmering ranks in the shallow water close to the right-hand shore, the big sea mammals, wonderfully lithe and agile in spite of their bulk, were spreading consternation among the finny phalanxes.
Swift as the mullet were, the dolphins were swifter still; and just ahead of them, as they charged side by side through the shallows, a silvery shower of fish, each of them from six to eight inches in length, curved through the air and rained down into the water. It was this rain of fish rather than the dolphins themselves that interested the eagle, circling and poising, eagerly awaiting his chance. Sooner or later, he knew, one of those leaping mullet, fleeing madly before the oncoming dolphins, would leap in the wrong direction and fall upon the mud between the marsh and the water's edge. Then, if he could drop upon it from the air before it flopped back into the water, he would have his dinner.
A little distance downstream, around a bend of the creek, another hunter was watching and waiting. Deaf Jen Murray, famous among the negro marshmen of the Low Country for the length of his lean arms, which enabled him to cast his line twenty feet farther into the surf than the most powerful of his rivals, crouched in his little flat-bottomed punt watching the eagle with avid, crafty eyes. Jen had fished the flood tide that morning at a shell bank just below the creek bend and had made a good catch of whiting and croaker. An hour before high water, when the fish had stopped biting, he had pushed his punt into the entrance of a little gully opening into the creek. Then, bending the tall marsh grass over him to shut out the glare—and also to hide the boat from view in case a squadron of black ducks settled on the creek—he had lain down in the punt for a nap.
He had slept longer than he intended. When he was awakened by a sudden movement of the punt as it slid a foot or so on the soft mud of the gully now left nearly dry by the receding tide, the first thing that he saw through the screen of marsh blades bending above him was the eagle hovering in the air —two or three hundred yards away. Slowly and very cautiously he drew his wiry body to a sitting posture and reached stealthily for his rusty single-barreled gun.
For years Jen had known and admired the king, the greatest eagle that he had ever seen, and often he had said to himself that some day he would capture the bird. He wanted the king, not dead but alive and uninjured. A dead eagle was merely so much carrion of which he could make no use; but a living eagle, especially so fine a specimen as this one, would bring two or three dollars from some enterprising shopkeeper in the city who could draw a crowd by exhibiting the captive in his window. To Jen two dollars was a vast sum; and as the king, swerving and hovering over the charging dolphins, drew nearer and nearer, the marshman fingered his weapon eagerly and blessed the luck which seemed about to bring the big bird within fairly easy range. If the king held his course until he was almost directly over Jen's head, the marshman, who was as skillful with his gun as he was with his surf line, felt pretty confident that he could cripple one of those long wide wings and bring his victim down without serious injury.
Nearer and nearer came the king. Jen could not see the dolphins—or porpoises, as he would have called them—and, being almost stone deaf, he could not hear the swish of their big bodies through the water; but knowing the life of the marshes and the marsh creeks as he did, he guessed the reason for the eagle's tactics. His only fear now was that the eagle's chance might come while he was still beyond easy range. The negro's white teeth clamped together as he saw the king suddenly close his wings and plunge, his head held low, his yellow talons opened wide beneath him; and as the great bird disappeared behind the tall grasses the marshman jumped to his feet, determined to shoot as soon as the eagle rose, though the distance was so great that only if good luck aided his marksmanship could he hope to bring down the quarry.
So far, at any rate, fortune favored the king. The prize that he clutched in his sharp curved claws as he stood on the sloping shore of the creek was not a mullet, but a four-pound channel bass, its redgold back and flanks glittering in the sunlight. Hard pressed by the dolphins as it swam along in the midst of the mullet host, the bass had leaped out of the water just as the jaws of its would-be destroyer were about to close upon it. Falling in the shallows within a few inches of the shore, the fish had been washed a foot or so up the shelving muddy bank by the wave which the charging dolphins made as they rushed past; and instantly the king, rejoicing at the sight of a prize so much better than that which he had hoped for, had fallen upon it from the air and driven his long talons into its sides.
The king stood for a few minutes upon the body of his victim, waiting until its struggles became less violent; then, spreading his wings, he rose against the wind, lifting the bass almost without effort. He was forty feet above the marsh when he saw the marshman, now standing erect, his head projecting above the tall grass, his gun at his shoulder. With a harsh scream the eagle swerved and slid down the wind, his body slanting sharply, gaining speed each instant. The gun barrel swung swiftly around a half circle, held steady a fraction of a second, then spouted flame and smoke.
The king screamed again as a numbing shock paralyzed his left wing. His claws opened, releasing the bass, while he struggled frantically to right himself in the air and check his fall. Then, as two dark brown quill feathers whirled past him spiraling downward, the numbness of his wing passed as suddenly as it had come, and with swift powerful strokes of his pinions he swept onward and upward, again on an even keel and again in full possession of his powers.
Jen Murray, the marshman, gazed after him with gleaming eyes. His charge of duck shot had merely clipped two feathers from the eagle's wing; but, at any rate, a fine bass had been added to his catch, for he had marked the spot where the fish had fallen, and presently he would make his way across the boggy marsh and get it. This was a stroke of luck, and Jen was not inclined to complain. Moreover, an idea had come to him and a plan which he had long considered vaguely began to take shape in his mind.
Never before had he seen the king so close at hand, and never before had he realized what a truly magnificent specimen the bird was. That huge eagle, he was confident, would be worth five dollars to him if he could take it to town uninjured; and already his thoughts were busy with a scheme for accomplishing that end and perhaps at the same time accomplishing something else even more worth while, something which would make even the splendid sum of five dollars appear trivial and insignificant compared with the glittering wealth which would then be at his command.
Jen lost no time in putting his plan into execution. He said nothing about it to any of his acquaintances. In the first place, he wanted all the fruits of his venture for himself; and in the second place, he knew that some, though by no means all, of his neighbors would laugh at him if he told them what he had in mind. Early the next morning he left the little house where he lived alone on the edge of the marshes, and rowed in his square-headed punt mile after mile along lonely winding marsh creeks to the back beach of one of the barrier islands stretching in a long chain between the marshes and the sea. Pulling a little way down the deep narrow inlet separating this barrier isle from the next, he landed on the sandy inlet shore and followed it to the front beach. There, at a point where a long sand spit thrust far out into the ocean, he waded into the surf and, whirling his hand line, baited with cut mullet, over his head, cast his hooks into the outermost breakers. Then he turned his back on the sea and began to search the sky.
Jen knew that somewhere in the dense semitropical jungle covering the whole interior of this barrier island the king had his nest, but he did not know exactly where the nest was, and, since the island was some six miles in length and a half mile or more in width, he wanted to get some idea of the approximate locality before beginning his search. The best way to do this, he thought, was to take his stand on the front beach and watch the sky for the king or his mate; and in planning this preliminary part of his task the marshman had decided to combine business with adventure by trying his luck with the big channel bass of the surf.
After a half hour of waiting, he felt a tremendous tug and, jerking the line viciously, grinned with delight as he realized that he had hooked an unusually large and powerful fish.
Had he been using the rod and reel of a sportsman there would have ensued a glorious battle amid the curling breakers; but with Jen Murray fishing was not a species of play, and after the fish had somewhat spent its strength in three spirited rushes he hauled away hand over hand upon the heavy line and soon had his victim—a splendid thirty-pound bass, gleaming in the light like burnished bronze—gasping on the beach. Then, just as he rose to his feet after unhooking the fish, he saw the king high over his head journeying in from the sea.
Jen watched the big bird eagerly and marked with care the spot where he spiraled down into the jungle. After hiding his bass in a tamarisk thicket just above high-water mark, so that the watchful turkey vultures, incessantly patrolling the sky, would not spy it from the air, he walked two miles up the lonely palm-fringed beach to a point opposite the place where the eagle had descended. On the way he saw the king, this time accompanied by his mate, rise out of the woods and, circling upward, fly straight out over the ocean.
The marshman grinned again with a gleam of white teeth upon seeing the king and his mate start seaward on what would probably be a long hunt. It suited his purpose admirably that they should absent themselves for a while, for it might take him some time to find the nest. As a matter of fact it took him longer than he had expected; for in those dense jungle-like woods of palmetto, pine and stunted live oak, where impenetrable thickets of cassena often barred his way, and long narrow reed-bordered lagoons of still, wine-colored water compelled him to make long and laborious detours, his progress was necessarily slow. For another reason also he picked his steps with great care. He had in unusual degree the deadly fear of snakes of all kinds, which as a rule is so strong in even the most experienced woodsmen, and he knew that in many of the barrier-island jungles the venomous cottonmouth moccasin abounded. Jen was as much a woodsman as he was a marshman and beachcomber; but, except in winter, when he sometimes trapped raccoons on another barrier island nearer his home, he kept out of these seaside jungles, with their semitropical vegetation and their vast summer populations of stinging and biting insects.
There were few insects to bother him, now that the cool weather had come. Perhaps because he was careful to give warning of his approach, he saw no moccasins nor any other wild things, except one dark-gray white-nosed fox squirrel, which peered down at him from a pine top, and three tall long-legged black-and-white wood ibises, as big as geese, standing motionless at the edge of a small stagnant jungle pool—belated stragglers from the great ibis flocks which had sailed away to the southward as summer merged into fall. None of these interested Jen. His eyes shifted from the lush weeds and grasses and fallen palmetto fronds at his feet where hidden danger might lurk, to the tops of the pines towering above the lower growth; and finally he saw the nest, a bulky castle of sticks, seven feet or more in diameter, fixed some seventy feet above the ground in the crotch of a pine standing almost in the center of a small circular opening in the jungle.
He made his way to the base of the tree, which was rather slender in proportion to its height, studied its trunk and the arrangement of its branches just below the nest, and grinned his satisfaction. No insuperable difficulties stood in the way of his scheme; and he noted with approval too, that the eagles had evidently completed their annual repairs to the nest in preparation for the laying of the two big white eggs, an event which in the Low Country generally takes place in November.
So far so good. Searching the circle of sky visible above his head to make sure that no soaring eagle had seen him, Jen withdrew to the edge of the little opening in which the pine stood, and concealed himself with great care in the dense cover of the surrounding cassena thicket.
There he sat patiently for an hour, smoking his corncob pipe and building air castles. He saw the king and his mate return, watched the latter alight on a pine limb near by, while the former, carrying a big catfish carcass in his claws, flew to the nest; and he marked with care the exact spot on the nest on which the eagle alit. Then, when the king and his consort had departed again, perhaps in search of more food to deposit in the nest, which they often used as a storehouse, Jen rose and went his way, well pleased with the results of his scouting. He did not know that there was another King of Odistash who reigned on this jungle-covered barrier isle—a mighty monarch, clad in glittering mail, who ruled with irresistible power and merciless tyranny; and Jen laid his plans for the next day's operations unaware that cold, lidless, unwinking eyes had watched him as he dreamed in his cassena ambush and that for an hour he had sat within twenty feet of death.
By nine o'clock the next morning Jen was back at the edge of the little opening in the jungle beneath the eagles' pine. From the shelter of the thicket he saw the two big birds perching side by side on a limb near the nest, and he waited in concealment until in about thirty minutes they circled upward and headed out to sea. Then he went energetically to work.
To Jen the climb up the pine trunk was a small matter. It was his boast—not altogether a vain one—that he could follow wherever a ring-tailed coon might lead. With a length of stout rope passed around his waist and around the trunk of the tree, he went up slowly but steadily, stopping twice to rest, and in less than ten minutes he gained the first of the pine's few limbs. Directly below the great bulging nest there was some little delay; but presently, with the help of his rope, his long steelcorded arms drew his lean light body up on one of the large limbs forming the crotch in which the king's castle was built. Standing on this limb, to which his bare feet stuck like the clinging feet of a tree frog or a lizard, he peered eagerly over the rim of the nest.
The king's castle, his home for more than twenty-five years, was built mainly of sticks, some of them nearly as stout as Jen's wrist, bark, sods and gray Spanish moss. Each season the king and his mate had repaired it and added to it until now it was nearly six feet in height, and the marshman, standing tiptoe on the limb, could barely see its flat interior, lined with moss, sedge, pine straw, leaves and grass. Testing the structure of the nest, Jen found that the sticks forming its outer walls were so firmly interlaced that, by putting most of his weight on a convenient branch just within reach of his hand, he could make his way to the summit. This he proceeded to do; then, kneeling on the top of the nest, amid the fragments of fish and other refuse that he found there, he began his search, thrusting his hand through and under the moss and grass.
Almost at once he uttered an exclamation of delight. Six inches under the moss his hand had closed upon something round and hard, a little larger than a hen's egg. A matter-of-fact man who had never heard of the Eagle Stone which had power to open money vaults and treasure chests, might have supposed that this hard round thing deep under the loose bedding of the nest was a waterworn bit of limestone, a spherical piece of bone or a nodule of black marsh mud compressed in the course of time to the hardness of rock and brought up to the nest in the sods which formed part of the structure. But Jen, all aquiver with exultant joy, knew that he had found the precious object of his quest.
He knelt for a moment, shaking like a man with fever, his hand still under the moss. Then he withdrew it empty, fished a big blue cotton handkerchief out of his pocket and worked it under the mossy mattress of the nest. He would run no risk of letting even one ray of light touch the Eagle Stone and thus weaken or destroy its magic. When he again withdrew his hand the dark-blue handkerchief was wrapped around it and around the object which it enclosed; and as quickly as possible he thrust the treasure, still wrapped in the handkerchief, into his trousers pocket.
Jen was a practical soul. Credulous and superstitious he was, like most of the dusky marshmen and woodsmen of the Low Country, a believer in "hants" and incantations and spells and in many queer legends and myths about the abundant wild folk of the Low Country woods and marshes. But he knew that there were some who scoffed at the story of the Eagle Stone, and he had started on this quest with a double object in view, so that if he found no talisman in the eagles' nest he still might profit from his undertaking. His own doubts, if he had any, as to the virtue of the talisman had now vanished pretty completely, but this did not prevent him from carrying out also the other part of his design.
First he climbed some distance down the pine and out upon a limb. With a sharp hatchet which he carried in his belt he cut a section of this limb, about four feet in length and weighing perhaps ten pounds, and lashed it to the pine trunk below the nest, using a very light cord just strong enough to hold it in place. Then he made his way back into the nest and with the sure instinct and uncanny skill which had so often aroused the envy of his fellows he set about his delicate task there. In fifteen minutes he had completed it, and after a final careful inspection to satisfy himself that the nest showed no evidences of his visit, he began his descent.
Just as he reached the ground he saw a tiny speck against the blue sky—a speck which might be only a soaring turkey vulture or ibis, but, on the other hand, might be the king or his mate. Stooping low, his hand clutching the treasure in his pocket, he hastened to his hiding place near the edge of the cassena thicket.
He was just in time. Five minutes later the king alit on the rim of the nest. The marshman's luck was still with him. It was the great bird himself and not his mate, who was noticeably smaller than her lord, though in nearly all cases the female eagle is the larger. And Jen's skill, his boasted woodcraft, held good also. His sharp eye and quick brain had made no mistake. He had studied the interior of the king's castle with an almost preternatural understanding of what it revealed as to the eagle's accustomed movements after alighting. Coming to rest upon the same smooth rounded stick at the nest's rim upon which Jen had seen him alight the day before, the king paused there a few moments, turning his snowy head this way and that, glancing keenly about him. Then with a rather awkward hop he passed to the flat, moss-lined and grass-littered interior of the nest within the circle of sticks.
Instantly he leaped upward, his great wings beating desperately, madly, churning the air. Ten feet or so he rose, with the small rusty steel trap with which Jen caught minks gripping two toes of his left foot, crushing them together. A long slender cord of strong fishing line, doubled and twisted, led downward from the trap over the rim of the nest to the section of pine limb lashed to the tree trunk. As the cord tightened, the eagle, his ascent arrested, screamed with rage and swung outward. For a moment he remained stationary in the air, held by the cord, his powerful wings beating more furiously than ever. Suddenly something gave way beneath him. For a quarter of a minute perhaps he held a level course over the roof of the jungle. Then, his wings laboring mightily, he began to slant downward.
Far beneath him, at the end of the cord, dangled the heavy pine clog, which, just as Jen had intended, had pulled loose from the tree trunk as soon as the trapped eagle jerked the cord strongly. Lower and lower sank the king, fighting to the last. Then the clog caught in the billowy green top of the cassena thicket and the eagle pitched earthward. Grinning with quiet satisfaction, Jen, who had rushed out into the clearing to mark the spot where the great bird fell, set out to find him, picking up a light stick on his way to help him make a passage through the dense growth.
A hundred yards from the eagles' pine, in an open sunny spot just beyond the outer edge of the cassena thicket, a diamond rattlesnake lay at full length in the short grass. Nearly seven feet long from the point of his plated arrow-shaped head to the end of his fifteen-ringed rattle and fully eleven inches in girth, his greenish-yellow body marked with dark-brown rhomboidal blotches bordered with gold, the huge serpent was a superb specimen of his terrible race, at once gorgeously beautiful and indescribably hideous. Even more arrogantly than the king of the air ruled the spaces above the island jungle the giant rattler ruled the jungle itself. A monarch of uncertain temper, his mood depending mainly upon the state of his stomach, he had watched Jen with sluggish well-fed tolerance the day before as the marshman sat in his cassena ambush near the eagles' pine. Today, however, he was hungry and his mood had changed. His fury knew no bounds when suddenly, with a swish and surge of mighty wings, a great white-headed bird swooped down from the air and landed in the grass directly in front of him and not more than two feet from his nose.
With almost incredible swiftness the big rattler threw his long thick body into coil, his kettledrum ringing its insistent challenge, his dreadful spear-shaped head drawn well back within the circle of his dilating mailed body and pointed directly at the presumptuous intruder who had dared to invade his privacy.
Promptly the king, somewhat shaken but uninjured by his fall, faced about to confront the snake. The trap on his foot hampered him sadly, but the long cord connecting the trap with the pine clog had fallen slack and he had some freedom of movement. He knew nothing about rattlesnakes, and, although their kingdoms lay so close together, he had never seen this serpent monarch before; but somehow he was aware that there was deadly peril in the huge reptile coiled in front of him, glaring at him with small, glittering, stony eyes, as hard and cold as jewels. Captive though he was in the grip of the trap, the king's bold spirit rose to meet the danger, and from his own deep-set, piercing, yellow eyes he sent back glare for glare.
A half minute the two kings—the king of the air and the king of the island jungle—faced each other thus. Then the rattler, jaws gaping hugely so that the two white curved hollow fangs projected straight forward, lunged at the eagle's breast. The eagle—thanks, no doubt, to the marvelous quickness of his vision—seemed to sense the blow even before it was launched. He tried to jump backward, but the trap checked him, and, thrown sideways by the effort, he instantly spread his wings to regain his balance. Thus, in the nick of time, one broad pinion interposed between his body and the snake and caught the rattler's blow as a gladiator's shield might catch a sword thrust. A pale yellowish fluid dripped down over the stiff, black-brown primary feathers of the outspread wing; and just as the king regained his footing and faced his foe again the rattler struck his second blow.
Again the eagle's amazing eyesight played its part, apparently flashing to his brain a warning that the envenomed spearhead was about to be launched. He was a little farther from the snake now, his maneuver during the first attack having lifted and moved the trap some six inches. Though still within the rattler's reach, he was only just within it; and when, in instant response to the warning given by his eyes, he tried to jump backward as before and was again checked by the trap and thrown off his balance, the swift movement carried him just beyond the danger line.
Again the long, thin, needlelike fangs, thrusting forward out of the great serpent's hugely gaping jaws, clashed against the heavily shafted feathers of the eagle's outstretched wing as he strove with a desperate flapping of his pinions to regain his footing; and again the dark-brown feathers were sprinkled, but not so plentifully as before, with pale-yellow fluid. Once more the king had won, and he seemed to know it. Proudly erect he stood, his white head held high, his shining eyes, deep under their frowning brows, glaring defiance.
Jen Murray the marshman, thrusting his way with the aid of his stick through the outermost fringe of the cassena thicket, realized anew that he had never before seen an eagle as splendid as this one. As Jen stepped out into the open his eyes were fixed upon the king, appraising with the enjoyment of a connoisseur the great bird's beautifully molded form, clear-cut as marble, the gleaming whiteness of his head, neck and tail contrasting vividly with the rich dark brown of his big broad-shouldered body and his wings. For the moment, the marshman forgot everything else, even the Eagle Stone itself, in wonder at the size and the dauntless bearing of the feathered monarch standing there before him, held helpless by the trap, yet looking every inch a conqueror.
But into Jen's mind there crept no pang of compassion, no sense of sympathy for the great valiant bird, robbed of his freedom and brought down to earth by the cunning strategy of the marshman's brain. His small eyes shone with the joy of possession as he strode swiftly forward through the grass, intent only upon making sure of his prize. He did not know how firm a grip the trap, which was rather an old one, had upon the eagle's foot, and he would not feel certain of his triumph until he had his prisoner in his hands. He intended to grapple with the eagle by throwing his coat over the bird's head, thus saving himself from being torn by the strong hooked beak or the long claws; but first he walked close up to the king to have a look at the trap and satisfy himself that its hold was good.
The rattlesnake, coiled close beside a tussock of tall stiff olive-green grass with the color of which the hues of his body blended perfectly, had been so absorbed in his duel with the eagle that he failed to note the approach of another enemy until Jen was almost upon him. Then swiftly his terribfe head, poised above his massive coils, swung to face the new foe. To Jen's deaf ears the huge serpent's rattle, incessantly ringing its challenge, carried no warning, and the marshman, his attention focused upon the eagle, saw the great reptile, half-hidden by the grass at his feet, at the very moment when the glittering, lustrous coils sprang open as though released by a trigger and the hideous head with its yawning jaws flashed forward and upward.
With a scream Jen leaped, slashing wildly at the snake with the stick held in his left hand. Even in that mad moment he knew that he was too late. He had felt the impact of the snake's head on his thigh, and a swift overpowering surge of terror turned the green jungle black around him. As he staggered, fainting, barely able to see, his legs suddenly weak, his foot caught in the light, strong cord leading from the eagle's trap to the pine clog fifteen yards away in the thicket. Pitching forward on his face, he lay motionless in the grass six feet behind the king.
At an equal distance in front of the eagle the great rattler squirmed and writhed, twisting and turning with convulsive spasmodic jerks of his burly, muscular body. Plainly he was in trouble. Jen's slender stick, whipping through the air, had struck the side of the snake's head as it drew swiftly back after delivering its thrust, and the big reptile, his lower jaw knocked askew, was dazed by the blow.
Possibly his spine had been injured. He seemed unable to lift his head and neck more than an inch or two from the ground, and apparently he could not bend his body back into the close symmetrical coil which was his fighting attitude. That coil was a living spring, supplying the motive power for the long swift thrusts of his head, and only when coiled could he strike with his accustomed strength, quickness and accuracy.
Yet, crippled though he was, he was still formidable, and the pain which racked him added to his fury. Whether by chance or by design, his frenzied writhings and lashings to and fro were bringing him nearer and nearer to the eagle. Soon he was within half his length of the king, and the javelinlike head, its jaws flaring crookedly, shot forward close to the ground in the direction of his foe. The blow fell short, but in another moment the seemingly aimless and uncontrolled contortions of the snake landed him almost at the king's feet, and savagely the broad flat head lunged again.
The king could retreat no farther. When Jen, fainting with terror, had stumbled across the trap line and fallen, his foot had pulled the line taut, and the trapped eagle was anchored where he stood. The king knew this, for he had tried vainly to move. His muscles tightened and his eyes glowed a fiercer yellow as the writhing monster drew nearer and nearer. Just as the rattlesnake's poisoned javelin shot forward two inches above the ground in that final thrust, the eagle's wings opened, beating powerfully, and with his free foot he struck forward and downward, his talons spread to the utmost. Next moment his claws closed upon the rattler's head.
The king was fast to his foe, clamped to him with a grip that could not be shaken. Two long claws had pierced the snake's wide head from above, another had sunk deep into his throat from below, and the muscles operating those claws were strong enough to drive them through gristle and bone. The huge serpent threshed and writhed like a creature in convulsions, and the eagle, one foot in the trap, the other imbedded in his enemy, was all but torn in two. Pulled this way and that as the contortions of the stricken snake dragged eagle and trap here and there over the ground, the king could not keep himself upright no matter how desperately his Pinions beat the air. His wing beats were growing weaker when another convulsive twist of the giant snake's powerful body almost wrenched the big bird asunder and a sharp, intolerable pain shot through him.
That pain was the signal of his victory. A corner of the trap had been jammed under a grass tussock, and the toes of the eagle's left foot had been jerked free by that last and mightiest plunge of the rattler, the trap's steel jaws raking them to the bone.
Somehow the king knew that his chance had come. Putting all his strength into the effort, he drew the talons of his other foot out of the rattler's head. Next moment his wide pinions, strongly beating, were bearing him upward into the air.
Jen Murray, the marshman, with all his faith in his own woodcraft, was never quite sure that he had figured out correctly precisely what happened while he lay insensible. The first thing that he saw when he opened his eyes and rolled over on his back was an eagle high in the air, spiraling upward into the blue, his snowy head gleaming like silver in the sun. Instantly, then, came recollection and, with it, another wave of the overpowering terror which had dropped him in a dead faint in the grass. Not until a hurried examination revealed the fact that the rattler's fangs had imbedded themselves harmlessly in the thick, bulky folds of the big handkerchief wrapped about the rounded stone in his pocket did Jen recover command of his faculties.
Then, assured that he was not going to die, he looked about him and saw the great snake ten feet from him in the grass, writhing feebly, evidently near death. He saw the holes and gashes in the rattler's bloody head, he saw in the grass and on the ground the evidences of a struggle, he saw the empty trap. But he was still feeling somewhat sick and weak and ne did not stay to study to the last detail the mystery of the king's escape and of the dying serpent.
The priceless Eagle Stone, which would bring him riches incalculable, was safe in his pocket, and already it had proved its virtue by saving his life. He smashed the rattler's head with an oak stick, then slung the huge carcass over the stick and started homeward. It would yield much oil, excellent for rheumatism, and the skin, nicely tanned and stretched, could be sold for half a dollar to some young blood of the Odistash plantations who would make a dashing scarf out of it for his lady.