Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/151

 and reached stealthily for his rusty single-barreled gun.

For years Jen had known and admired the king, the greatest eagle that he had ever seen, and often he had said to himself that some day he would capture the bird. He wanted the king, not dead but alive and uninjured. A dead eagle was merely so much carrion of which he could make no use; but a living eagle, especially so fine a specimen as this one, would bring two or three dollars from some enterprising shopkeeper in the city who could draw a crowd by exhibiting the captive in his window. To Jen two dollars was a vast sum; and as the king, swerving and hovering over the charging dolphins, drew nearer and nearer, the marshman fingered his weapon eagerly and blessed the luck which seemed about to bring the big bird within fairly easy range. If the king held his course until he was almost directly over Jen's head, the marshman, who was as skillful with his gun as he was with his surf line, felt pretty confident that he could cripple one of those long wide wings and bring his victim down without serious injury.

Nearer and nearer came the king. Jen could not see the dolphins—or porpoises, as he would have called them—and, being almost stone deaf, he could not hear the swish of their big bodies through the water; but knowing the life of the marshes and the