Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/177

 himself did not move, those eyes remained wide awake, fiercely and intently alert; and presently they saw this scarlet spot stir slightly, grow larger and then resolve itself into the red crest and black-mustached face of a logcock peering cautiously around the chestnut limb.

What happened then happened in less time than is required to tell it; and it was an odd whim of the woods fates to bring to a crisis at precisely the same moment the little drama of the tree-tops and that other drama which, all the while, had been developing on the ground below.

Suddenly the place where Cloud King had been perching was empty. With the speed of a bullet the peregrine was shooting through the air toward the chestnut limb behind which the logcock was hiding. In that same instant Red Rogue, the fox, saw at last the victim for which he had been waiting, the mysterious maker of those stealthy sounds which for so many minutes had been drawing nearer in the kalmias.

To Red Rogue there had never been the slightest mystery about those sounds. He had known from the beginning exactly what they were; and he was not in the least surprised when a tall wild gobbler stepped out from the shrubbery just beyond the rock.

Red Rogue crouched close to the ground, his slim