Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/22

 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