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 for a brief instant, then release it. The ibis dropped like astone. The eagle swung down in a wide spiral to the spot where his victim had fallen into the tall marsh grass.

Mat Norman, a thoughtful man like many of his kind, brooded long over what he had seen. He had witnessed what to him was almost a miracle. He had seen a law of the wild reversed, a rule of Nature broken. All his life he had known the eagles of the coast and never had he seen one of them do what this eagle had done. For two hours, as he steered his launch along the sinuous placid marsh creeks, he turned the problem over in his mind, and gradually a suspicion which had dawned in him took more and more tangible form as affording the only possible solution.

He determined to keep an especially sharp lookout for a big dark eagle which at a distance appeared to be a bald eagle in the somber plumage of youth, but which, upon closer examination, might prove to be something else—something so rare on the Low Country coast as to be practically unknown there. And although he was not in the habit of killing eagles, he decided to conduct this search with a gun.

A month passed before he had an opportunity to test his theory. Meanwhile tales came to him which strengthened his belief in his own reasoning. On two mainland plantations lambs disappeared