Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/31



camp-robber, perched on a limb, was in considerable of a mental turmoil. His mentality was never of an extra high grade, and to-day his intellectual grasp had almost failed him. And the reason was that he had made an astonishing discovery; and these remote Idaho forests had suddenly revealed to him a form of life that he hadn't had any idea existed.

Of course his true name wasn't "camp-robber." In reality he belonged to that noisy, thievish jay-magpie assemblage that is to be found in almost all of the great Western forests, and he had a long and jaw-breaking scientific designation besides. But on the lower East Side it isn't necessary to hunt up the name in full of Tony the Dip, because the title describes him better than the name his mother gave him. It was much the same with the camp-robber. He got the title from his habits and it fitted him to perfection.

He was rather a gay old bird with considerable blue and gray in his feathers, and in his several months of life he had concluded that he knew these Idaho woods from one end to another. He thought it would be a long, cold summer day before he would meet a situation that he could not