Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/273

 than ever; his hooked beak gaped momentarily as his harsh, fierce challenge rang unheard through the solitude around him. Next moment he was shooting at terrific speed down a long steep incline, his wings half closed, his tail half spread, his head and neck thrust forward so that his body was like a great arrowhead cleaving the air.

The duck, mortally wounded yet even in its dying moments strong of wing, had passed a hundred yards beyond the marshman before it fell. Jen, grumbling a little because it had fallen not on the sands, where he could have recovered it more easily, but into the water beyond a fringe of marsh, was in the act of picking up his bass when a swift shadow sped across the sand close by him.

Instinctively he glanced upward, then dropped his fish and ran toward the marsh, breeching his gun as he ran and fumbling in his pocket for another cartridge. He found it and jammed the gun shut just as the eagle, abruptly checking his descent, hung for a moment twenty feet above the spot where the duck had fallen, then dropped out of sight behind the tall salt grass.

The big bird remained invisible for perhaps ten seconds. When he rose, the dead bluebill clutched in his talons, Jen threw the gun to his shoulder and fired. For some moments the marshman stood peering along the barrel; then he cursed with all the