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 set of her journey his mate must run a race with death. He knew only that his mate had left him and that she would not return—that, joyously, eagerly, exultantly, she had mounted at last to that broad blue road of the sky which for weeks had beckoned her, a road which led northward and ever northward to the far-off sloughs and prairie lakes where the wild duck myriads bred.

The golden circlets rimming the crippled drake's pupils glowed a brilliant orange. Rearing his body upward, he stood for an instant upon the surface of the water, his wings fanning the air. Not for weeks had he tried his pinions, dreading the burning agony which he had learned to associate with every effort to fly; but now his wings fanned faster and faster, and suddenly they lifted him. For a hundred yards he flew on, barely topping the taller reeds and sword rushes. Then he slumped abruptly downward, plunging with a splash into a flooded ricefield separated by a strip of marsh from the lagoon where he had spent so many weeks.

A month passed; a month of gnawing loneliness and incessant restlessness, spent dabbling in flooded ricefields and shallow marsh ponds which he shared with noisy gallinules, long-necked water turkeys, stately milk-white egrets, herons of several kinds and tall white and black ibises. He seldom saw the tyrant now because, with the departure of