# Gray Eagle (Sass collection)/Justice of the Wild

A HALF-HOUR before dawn, in the cypress swamp where the wood ibis flock slept, strange, harsh, unearthly sounds broke the silence which hung over the moss-tapestried cypresses around the shores of the lagoon. These sounds came from the trees where the ibises were talking with one another, clacking their bills, extending and retracting their long necks, opening and folding their wings, impatiently awaiting the coming of day. From the woods came the eerie songs of two chuck-will's-widows answering each other across the still dark water, and presently, close at hand, a big swamp owl woke the echoes with his sonorous "Whoo whoo, whoo-whoo whoo-who-whoo-who." Then, when the first faint light had begun to filter down through the moss curtains of the trees, the eleven-foot alligator who was master of this lagoon sent his long, melancholy, tremulous challenge rolling and quavering through the woods, a resonant, menacing call, incredibly strange and wild.
Scarcely had its last note died when old Sanute, chief of the wood ibis army, craned his long neck, ​spread his wide wings, and launched forward from his perch in the tallest of the cypresses. With a noisy flapping of great pinions which swayed and rocked the moss-pennants trailing from every branch, the whole ibis host, first in twos and threes, then in tens and twenties, took to the air. Their necks curving downward, their legs dangling, their ample wings laboring mightily, they lifted themselves in narrow circles through the mist—a whirling confusion of great white shapes dimly visible in the pallid light, passing and repassing like phantoms against the gray background of the curtained trees, spiraling upward to clear the cypress-tops.
For some minutes after the last of them had risen above the trees the whole flock swung in ever-widening circles above the forest, mounting steadily towards the higher level where the leader sailed back and forth, peering down with frequent twists and turns of his big, queer-looking head as though studying the maneuvers of his followers. Then, satisfied that the army was ready to begin its aërial march, he turned his long bill southeastward towards the distant sea marshes behind the barrier islands.
Very wise with the wisdom of many summers was Sanute, leader of the wood ibis host—very wise and very old. But it was not with him as with men. He had not paid in physical vigor for the knowledge which the years had brought. Despite ​his age, he was as strong as he ever had been, as tireless, as active, as quick of sight and of hearing.
A certain beauty he had even when seen standing at rest, though his long legs and neck, his naked head, and long heavy bill curved towards the tip and much stouter than that of a heron, made him appear a fantastic, even a grotesque, figure, according well with the uncouth and ghostly background of the lagoon where the ibises slept. But it was in the high air and in the full light of the sun that he was at his best. Then—his neck and legs stretched to the utmost, his wide wings, more than six feet from tip to tip, fully extended—he was a splendid and memorable sight as he sailed and circled two hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand feet above the marshes, looking down upon his fellows. Always, when soaring thus, Sanute mounted well above all the other birds of the ibis flock, for he was larger than any of the others and stronger of wing and he liked to exhibit his supremacy. And of them all he was not only the largest and strongest but also the handsomest. Time had not dulled his colors but had brightened and intensified them. His yellowish-brown bill was yellower than theirs; his long legs and the sides of his naked head were bluer; his body and wings were of a purer and more brilliant whiteness; his tail and wing-tips, instead ​of being dull black, glittered with a metallic green and purple iridescence.
The other ibises of the flock acknowledged without question the leadership which Sanute exercised. It was the due reward of his superior physical powers and of his experience and wisdom. Most of the other ibises were young birds, many of them birds of the year, fully grown but not yet attired in fully adult plumage. In the youngest of them the head and neck were not bare but were covered with short downy feathers and the white plumage showed in places a grayish cast. They were the novices of the flock, the raw recruits of the ibis army, beside whom the two-yearand three-year-old birds who made up the bulk of the host felt themselves veterans. In addition to these youngsters of varying degrees of immaturity and inexperience, the flock included a good many older birds, some of them almost as old as Sanute himself. They had joined the brigade after the breeding season was over and had journeyed under Sanute's leadership to the wide lonely sea marshes of the Low Country coast between the palm-fringed barrier islands and the forested mainland, marshes which for many summers had been the old ibis's favorite feeding ground.
It was towards these marshes that Sanute led his feathered troopers from their sleeping place in the cypress swamp. They flew high above the tree-tops ​not only for safety's sake but also to clear the uppermost stratum of the morming mist spread like a blue-gray blanket over the forest, shutting it completely from view. Always old Sanute, jealous of his leadership, held the van, but the rest of the flock maintained no fixed or regular order. Sometimes they swept along over a broad curving front nearly five hundred feet from flank to flank. Again for a space they were strung out in single file or in two long, crooked, converging lines somewhat resembling the wedge-shaped formation of migrating geese; but generally they flew in a loose, rather irregular phalanx, perhaps four times as long as it was wide.
When they had left the denser forest behind them and were approaching the edge of the bay, the mist blanket seemed to slide away from under them and they looked down upon a green smiling country where patches of woodland alternated with cultivated fields. Here Sanute mounted fifty feet higher, and all his followers mounted after him. Thus, when they sighted the little house where Red Cam Reppington the hunter lived alone near the edge of Little Raccoon Swamp, they were well above shotgun range.
Red Cam, up earlier than usual, saw them when they were yet half a mile away. He knew that every morning the ibis army passed over his house en route from their secret sleeping place in the deep ​cypress swamps to the salt marshes of the coast where they spent the forenoon feeding; but because the ibises were not game birds he had hitherto taken little interest in them and had never made special note of the precise time of their coming. They were at least half an hour earlier than he had expected, but, as it happened, this mattered little, since he had made his preparations the night before.
With practiced eye he measured the height of the approaching flock, then darted into the house. In a half-minute he was out again, carrying not his shotgun but the high-powered rifle which he had placed, loaded and ready, just inside his door. Careful to keep himself out of sight, he crouched at the corner of the house, awaiting the moment which would offer him the best chance—the moment when the great ibis leading the oncoming host would be almost directly over him.
At best it was a question of luck. To hit his moving target at that height with a single bullet was a feat which even Red Cam, one of the best shots in the Low Country, could not perform unless fortune stood his friend. But Lady Luck, as he was fond of calling her, had often befriended Cam both in the woods and elsewhere, and he risked nothing by again invoking her aid. A wry grin twisted his florid, sullen face as he thought of what a tri​umph it would be to leave Sanute's severed head on the doorstep of a certain cottage that night as proof that when Cameron Reppington uttered a threat he would swiftly make it good.
Sanute knew nothing of rifles. But he knew as much as a bird can know about shotguns and he was serenely aware that no shotgun roaring at him from Red Cam's yard could possibly hurt him or any of his flock at the height at which they were traveling. Nevertheless, when his quick eye caught a spurt of flame and a tiny puff of white smoke far below him at the corner of Cam's house, the big bird seemed to rear and stagger in the air. Yet he did not fall. Instead, he evidently rose; for in an instant he was hidden from Cam's view by the vanguard of the ibis army rushing past beneath him.
Not all of them passed. A young ibis, a bird of the year, which had been flying directly behind Sanute, his bill almost touching the tips of the leader's extended feet, crumpled and dropped like a stone.
Cam growled an oath. Old Sanute had proved his cunning, halting in the air at the flash of the rifle and swerving upward so that even if the bullet had been perfectly aimed it would have passed harmlessly in front of him. Cam cursed himself and Lady Luck impartially. He did not bother to pick up the dead ibis where it plumped to earth beside a clump of yuccas. It was a young bird, he ​knew, and he could not substitute its feathered head for the bare head of Sanute, the veteran. Leaving it for his dog Brutus or for the turkey vultures, who would find it soon enough if Brutus scorned it, he turned back indoors to cook his breakfast.
Three miles beyond Cam Reppington's house, on a low bluff over-looking the wide emerald marshes of the bay, stood the small, white, vine-covered cottage where John Marston lived with his blue-eyed, brown-haired granddaughter Ellen. He, too, was astir early but no earlier than was his habit; for the little old man, as all the bay-dwellers called him, loved the fragrance and freshness of the June dawns even better than the crimson glories of the June sunsets, and nearly always he was up and dressed before the sun rose from behind the woods on the distant barrier islands along the edge of the sea.
There was another reason why, when June had come to the Low Country, John Marston seldom lay late abed. June brought the wood ibises to his marshes—tall, fantastic, long-necked and long-legged black and white storks that somehow gave him more pleasure than any others of the marshland birds; and early every morning from June to October an army of wood ibises, headed by an old ibis whom Marston had known for years and to whom ​he had given the name of an Indian warrior famous long ago in the Low Country, passed over the cottage bound for their feeding grounds on the salt flats. Marston, a lover of all wild creatures, a born naturalist with something of the poet in him, always found rare delight in watching the feathered army pass, and sometimes he would call excitedly to Ellen, busy indoors preparing breakfast, to come out on the porch and share the wonder of the spectacle.
But this morning the little old man, sitting in his favorite chair on the porch awaiting the ibises' coming, would hardly call his granddaughter. His mind was troubled. His sun-tanned face wore a frown and the vivid blue eyes above his short white beard were strangely cold and hard. He was thinking of Red Cam's oath and of the quarrel that had led to it and of what might come of it.
Cam Reppington, a gentleman born, could play the gentleman when he wanted to; and Ellen, whatever she might have heard, had never seen him drunk. In the old city days, which had ended with the fatal affair of the bank's money, he had been a clever hand with women; and when this girl took his fancy he had not found it hard to lie his way into her good graces so that for a while she had overruled her grandfather's objections to Cam's visits.
​At last she had realized the truth and had turned from him in disgust, loathing herself because for a time she had tolerated him. So, when Cam came again, John Marston had shown him the door; and Red Cam, redder than ever with rage, restrained only by Ellen's presence from driving his fist into the old man's face, had sworn to have revenge. At most of his threats Marston smiled because they were too dire to be fulfilled; but there was one that worried him, since it was a threat which Cam might safely carry out if he could compass its execution. It was the recollection of this threat that plagued John Marston as he sat on his porch smoking his long-stemmed pipe, awaiting the coming of the ibis host.
Presently he saw it, at first a mere speck against the sky to the northward, a speck which grew and lengthened and widened. Soon it had the appearance of a wavering black line above the woods; and then as it drew swiftly nearer it became a regiment of great long-necked birds as big as geese sweeping through the air in a wide curved rank like a bent bow two hundred feet above the trees.
With shining eyes Marston watched them as they came on, planing downward as they left the woods behind them and drew nearer the edge of the wide marsh plain. The army was almost directly over him now, one great bird larger and whiter than the ​rest leading the way. He could hear the swish of the broad black-edged wings and could almost distinguish the color of the dark-brown eyes in the great elongated heads which, as though weighed down by the long, curved, heavy bills, were carried a little low. Both joy and trouble were in the little old man's face as, tilting back in his chair, he peered up at them as they passed—a splendid sight, indeed, their big white bodies and wings shining like silver in the morning light.
"There they go," he muttered, "old Sanute in command."
For a half-minute after the last of them had passed he continued to gaze upward. Slowly the delight which the spectacle of the ibis army never failed to bring him faded from his face as though yielding reluctantly to some insidious, repugnant thought which would not be denied.
"So Cam's going to kill you, is he?" he said aloud—"going to kill you and send me your head? Well, you're a wise old chief, Sanute, and Red Cam will never lift your scalp."
The boast seemed to dispel his fears. For a moment he smiled. But almost instantly the smile vanished. The vivid blue eyes hardened and narrowed and with a bang he brought down the uptilted legs of his chair.
"By God!" he exclaimed, striking his clenched ​fist into his palm, "I've stood all I'm going to stand! If Red Cam kills him I'll kill Cam."
Some five hours later, Sanute the wood ibis, standing in the water at the mouth of a small marsh gully, decided that one more mullet would be enough. His gullet was already crammed full, but he rejoiced in an exceedingly hearty appetite and he could accommodate another fish if it were not too large. The ibis army, breaking up into detachments, had scattered widely over the marshes, and then, dividing into still smaller squads, the ibises had set about getting breakfast. But Sanute fished alone, as always. He wanted no clumsy, bumptious, more or less inexpert youngster near him when he waded into the shallows of some sinuous marsh brook and grappled with the important business of satisfying that imperious appetite.
Tide had passed the half-ebb. The water was swirling out of the steep-sided, flat-bottomed gully in which he stood, his shoulders humped, his long neck extended, his big solemn-looking head cocked knowingly on one side. From time to time during the morning he had danced awkwardly about in the shallows, scratching the soft bottom of the gully to stir up the mud; then thrusting his bill into the cloudy water, he had held it there for a while, the scythe-like, sharp-edged mandibles partly open. The ​shrimp were not yet as large or as abundant as they would be later in the season, but the water flowing through his mandibles brought a good many little transparent crustaceans into the trap and few of these ever got out.
Now, however, he wanted no more shrimp, but a nice mullet with which to complete his meal; and, besides, the conditions were no longer auspicious for shrimp-fishing. A four-foot shark, whose dorsal and tail fins moved slowly back and forth across the mouth of the gully where it opened into a large marsh ⟨creek; it had⟩ invaded Sanute's fishing ground, and ⟨although no⟩ shark had ever attacked him, the old ibis preferred to hold his head high so that he could keep an eye on this intruder.
Presently his opportunity came. The heavy curved bill, its mandibles closed, shot down into the water and instantly rose again. It was a lightning-like stroke, powerful enough to stagger a raccoon if it had landed between the eyes, and in a moment a six-inch mullet, insensible or perhaps already dead, swirled to the surface of the little eddy at the edge of which the ibis stood.
Striding forward, he seized the fish, turned it deftly in his bill and swallowed it headforemost. Wading ashore, he took three quick steps over the hard, sun-baked mud between the water and the marsh; then, his Jong neck curving downward, his ​long legs dangling, he lifted himself with swift, strong wing beats into the air.
As he spiraled upward, Sanute surveyed the green salt prairies spread beneath him—the wide sea marshes stretching away northeastward and southwestward as far as his eye could see, bounded on one side by the forest of the distant Low Country mainland and on the other by the semi-tropical woods on the long narrow barrier islands beyond which lay the ocean. Above him, around him and below him he saw other ibises, some of them fishing at the mouths of little gullies opening into the tidal creeks which wound everywhere through the marshes; some sunning themselves in closely bunched flocks on shell mounds or heaps of sedge piled up by the tides; others winging their way lazily, with three or four wing beats, then a long graceful sail, towards the barrier island jungle; still others soaring beautifully on motionless pinions high in the windless upper air under the deep-blue June sky.
He saw also a pair of eagles soaring higher than the highest of the ibises; an osprey poising and hovering over a marsh creek where it opened into a broad shallow sound; scores of herons—great blues, little blues and Louisianas—passing back and forth beneath him with measured wing beats or fishing along the edges of the sinuous waterways; a squadron of brown pelicans floating on the surface of a ​wide creek near an inlet; a flock of more than fifty tall, glistening egrets completely covering, as though a shining white blanket were spread over it, the low, dense cassena thicket on a little hummock in the marsh. All these, and the long-winged royal terns and skimmers, the loquacious rails and willets, the handsome black and white red-billed oystercatchers, the graceful least terns, and the busy, restless sandpiper regiments on the curving inlet shore were familiar sights to Sanute and they interested him little. He had fed even more bounteously than usual. The languor of complete satiety was upon him. It was time for his midday siesta.
Some whim turned his bill towards the distant mainland woods instead of the barrier island jungle where he usually took his noon nap. Perhaps it was the sight of the egrets on the hummock far beneath him which put the notion in his head, for the place that he had in mind was a certain cypress-bordered freshwater lagoon where a great egret city was situated. Perhaps Fate had something to do with it—Fate which often, like an all-powerful, relentless genie or wizard of the wilderness, seems to arrange with the most minute care those tragic dramas of the woods which are none the less real because man so seldom witnesses them.
At any rate, when Sanute, after mounting almost as high as the towering eagles, set out for the lonely ​lagoon of the egrets some ten miles or more away, the little old man who lived in the white vine-covered cottage by the shore of the bay, was sitting on an oak stump beside that lagoon, feasting his eyes on the beauty of the tall milk-white birds perching in scores and hundreds in the young feathery-foliaged cypresses fringing the egret lake. And at that same moment Red Cam, his shotgun balanced in his tight hand, his black mongrel Brutus following at his heels, was making his way through the mixed forest of pine, oak and hickory in the midst of which lay the secluded serpentine backwater where the plumed white birds had their town.
A definite purpose had brought Cam to those woods. An inveterate hunter, he spent most of his time roaming with his gun. Laws and seasons were nothing to him. At all seasons he killed whatever game crossed his path. On this June day he was hopeful that Lady Luck would show him a wild turkey and he was working down through the woods towards the lagoon because a few days before he had seen the sign of a big gobbler in a certain swale near the water's edge. But John Marston had come to the lagoon by mere accident—or so he would have said if he had been asked about it, though it is possible that the woods genie, preparing the drama to be enacted there that day, was responsible for the chance which had turned him aside from his path.
​Tramping through the woods on his way to a certain lotus pond where many purple gallinules nested and reared their young, he had seen a large flock of egrets pass over high above the pines, flying eastward. They were bound, he knew, for the egret city, and reflecting that more than a week had passed since he had visited the place and that the young egrets would now be well grown, he had decided to let the gallinules wait for a day and had followed the big white birds.
For an hour he had been sitting on his oak stump beside the southern shore of the lagoon, an ideal post from which to watch the teeming life of the town. As always when he visited the egret metropolis, the wonder of it took possession of him. It was like a scene from another and more fantastic world, and the little old man, though skillful with words, had never been able to describe it.
To his right the tall, smooth, columnar trunks of great cypresses towered above the still water, their branches clothed with a gray spectral witchery of Spanish moss; but in front of him and to his left the cypress woods fell away and he looked out upon an open sunny lake walled in by young, dark-green, full-foliaged trees. In these marginal cypress woods and in small cypress groves and willow clumps rising here and there from the surface of the lake the egrets had their nests, nests which seemed innumer​able, ten or twelve or even a score of nests to each small tree. And everywhere—on the nests, in the trees and in the air—the great snowy birds, buoyant as air itself, graceful beyond description, adorned with long delicate plumes which drooped beyond their tails, perched and circled and soared.
John Marston sat like one entranced. For ten years or more he had visited the egret city many times each spring and summer; yet its magic never grew stale. His gaze shifted from point to point of the bewildering, ever-changing panorama before him; now resting upon a lone pyramidal cypress near the center of the lake where more than fifty egrets, young birds and adults, crowded together so closely as to hide almost entirely the lustrous foliage of the tree; now lingering upon a dead cypress-top across the lagoon where four big black snakebirds or anhingas, grotesque reminders of the incredible bird-reptiles of the incredible past, stood with their long sombre wings half-opened to the sun while all around them in the air white egrets and smaller blue herons, which shared the egret city, sailed and swerved—a kaleidoscopic aërial whirlpool of color and life.
Often the little old man's eyes, as though fascinated by the sight, returned to a spot near the middle of the lagoon where three great alligators ​lay between two lily-pad islands, their huge shapeless heads and jagged black backs showing above the surface. Even more potently than the snakebirds these long armored dragons of the waters carried his mind back to the fantastic Ancient World—back and back, across ages and æons, to that remote and seemingly fabulous time when the giant reptiles of the dinosaur dynasty ruled the earth. For this reason, despite their hideousness, he found delight in the big saurians also; and because those rugged, plated, sinister heads protruding from the dark water were an essential part of the outlandish magic of the lagoon, he looked for them always when he came to the egret town.
He was watching the motionless, seemingly lifeless 'gators when above them and farther to the left he saw Sanute the wood ibis sail into view over the tree-tops and come to rest on a dead cypress standing well out of the water. Marston recognized the big bird at once. He had known Sanute too well and too long to make any mistake; and he wondered what obscure chance had caused the ibis chief to return to the mainland for his midday Siesta instead of resorting as usual to the barrier island woods. He watched the big bird dispose himself comfortably on a limb of the dead cypress, unmindful of the transitory excitement of the egrets and herons who had their homes nearby; then Mar​ston's gaze wandered off to settle once more upon the three big reptilian masters of the lagoon.
He did not know that other eyes as keen and almost as practiced as his own had seen the ibis alight and had recognized the bird with equal certainty. Red Cam had been slowly making his way down through the woods on the opposite side of the lagoon. He had seen no sign of the gobbler for which he was looking and presently he sat down to rest at the foot of a big sycamore a few yards from the edge of the water.
Munching a chunk of bread, washed down with copious draughts from his flask, he talked to the black mongrel Brutus, as was his habit, grumbling about his luck, which seemed to have deserted him. Again and again, as the liquor worked on him, his thoughts returned to Ellen and her grandfather; and these too he cursed, vehemently, obscenely, laying his grievance before the dog as though the animal understood his words.
A swift shadow slid past him and in the midst of a tirade Cam glanced up quickly. It was not a turkey, as he had hoped, but a wood ibis, and, craning his neck to see beyond the willows fringing the lagoon, he watched the big bird alight on a dead limb far out over the water. A grin overspread his flushed face as he gazed. He rose hastily, reached for his gun, and, bidding Brutus ​follow close at heel, slunk away amid the tree trunks.
Red Cam moved swiftly with lynx-like litheness. The liquor which heated his brain and loosened his tongue while he rested under the sycamore seemed not to impair in the slightest his accustomed skill in all the arts of the woods. He knew well the wariness of the old ibis and he knew that his only chance of getting within range lay in crawling almost to the end of a low, narrow, reed-grown tongue of land, lined with willows and studded with upstanding cypress knees, extending well out into the lagoon. This would be no easy task, yet Cam felt that his luck had turned. Weeks or months might pass before he had another opportunity as good as this one to carry out the threat which was to be part of his revenge on the man he hated.
Sanute stood on his cypress limb, languid, motionless, seemingly asleep. His long neck was drawn in between his hunched shoulders, his heavy bill rested on his chest. He looked a picture of lazy, drowsy contentment. Often his eyes remained closed for minutes at a time; yet, though he seemed to doze, he was aware, by sight or sound, of nearly every unusual incident in the life of the lagoon around him.
Sometimes circling egrets passed so near him as almost to touch him with their snowy wings. A ​combative anhinga lit on the end of the cypress limb, stabbed at him with straight, sharp, javelin-like beak, and departed only when the ibis's neck suddenly lengthened and his stout bill lunged viciously at the intruder. Through lids that seemed to be tightly closed he saw a copper-backed red-bellied snake draw its glittering length out of the water and glide silently along a half-submerged log sixty feet below him; and once, when he appeared to be sunk in slumber, he caught the faint sucking noise made by a prowling raccoon as it drew its foot out of the soft clinging mud on the margin of the lagoon. But no sound came to him from the narrow willow-covered peninsula where Red Cam crawled slowly and laboriously through the muck, drawing nearer and nearer inch by inch, black Brutus crawling at his heels; and except when the light breeze stirred them, not a reed or a willow branch moved.
A half-hour passed. . . . A thunderous crashing roar shook the air of the egret city. Up from the trees on every side rose the startled egrets and herons in white and blue-gray clouds, croaking loud cries of alarm; and down from his perch on the cypress limb pitched Sanute the ibis, one great wing beating frantically—straight down into the waters of the lagoon close to the foot of the dead cypress.
John Marston, now standing tiptoe on his stump some seventy yards away on the other shore, saw ​Red Cam's burly, brown-shirted figure rise among the willows on the tongue of land near the tree in which the ibis had been perching and heard his hoarse shout of triumph.
The little old man's sun-tanned face flamed with the fury that possessed him. His blue eyes narrowed and glittered like sword-points; his breath came short and fast.
Yet instantly he realized his helplessness. There was nothing that he could do. He had no weapon and Cam had his shotgun. Later, he said to himself through clamped teeth, there would be a reckoning. For the present he stood still on his oak stump and watched. Unseen himself, he could see all that happened; and he saw that the ibis had not been killed but was swimming towards a little island in the lagoon formed by the reed-covered carcass of an ancient cypress which had fallen many years before.
Red Cam, thrusting the willow branches aside, peered out over the water to find his victim. He knew by the manner of the big bird's fall that its wing had been broken, and if this was the ibis's only injury the bird might yet escape him. Without stopping to replace the spent cartridge, he leveled his gun for a shot with the other barrel. But when he tried to draw his bead the swimming bird shimmered and danced before his eyes.
Cam swore, swaying on his feet as he strove to ​steady the gun. The liquor had him at last, taking possession of him suddenly as it so often did—laying hold of him all at once when the mental tension which had held his nerves taut was abruptly ended by the successful shot which had brought the ibis down.
Yet he must shoot and shoot quickly, for the crippled bird had nearly reached the reedy island of the cypress log. It was only when Cam tried to draw a fine sight along his gun barrel that his target jigged so madly before him in a dull red mist. Wide-eyed, his vision was fairly steady, fairly clear. Throwing the gun to his shoulder, he pulled trigger the moment the wavering muzzle covered the bird.
To the right of the ibis and behind him the water seethed and foamed where the scattering turkey shot peppered it. Sanute swam on. In another quarter-minute he had gained the half-submerged log and had clambered up its sloping side. There he stood, his bill gaping, his left wing drooping, his tall, bulky, white body overtopping the tallest of the reeds.
Red Cam, gripping a willow branch to hold himself steady, fumbled at his waist with the other hand. He could no longer trust his eye to measure distance accurately, but he believed that the ibis was still within long range. He would reload and shoot again and continue shooting until he hit the ​mark. But the hand that fumbled for the cartridge belt fumbled in vain; and Cam cursed again as he remembered that when he had sat down to rest under the sycamore he had removed the belt because it chafed his side.
It would take ten minutes or more to get the belt and return, but there was nothing else to be done. Turning, he stumbled over Brutus, the lanky black mongrel, sitting just behind him, as always eagerly awaiting his commands. An idea flashed into Cam's muddled brain. Stooping, he spoke to the dog, patting the animal's sleek head and pointing out over the lagoon.
Black Brutus knew instantly what was expected of him. And instantly he obeyed. The love that he bore this surly master of his was a strange thing, and not less strange was the boundless faith which now sent him unfaltering into waters where he would never have ventured of his own accord. A Low Country dog, whelped and reared in the Low Country and all his life a rover of the Low Country woods, he knew the dangers which lurked for him and all his race in the dark wine-colored waters of the cypress lagoons. But his master had spoken—the master who was his only friend—who sometimes beat and kicked him but who had never failed him in the woods; and he knew, as he plunged in and started swimming towards the log where the ibis ​stood, that this all-powerful master would watch over him from the bank and would hurl swift leaden death at any foe that attacked him on the way.
Marston, watching from his oak stump, saw it all and found in it confirmation of his suspicion that Cam was drunk. He glanced quickly towards the spot where, until that first shot rang out, the three great saurians had been basking at the surface of the water. Two of them had vanished altogether; but close to the place where they had been lying he saw two dark knobs, which might have been the blunt ends of waterlogged sticks, projecting an inch or so above the water and in front of them another knob. Presently all three of these knobs began to move, slowly at first, then, faster, yet hardly fast enough to disturb the placid surface of the lagoon.
Red Cam could not see them from where he stood, for the 'gator was behind and beyond the point of the willow-bordered peninsula, moving in a direction which would enable him to cut off the dog's retreat. And for some minutes black Brutus did not see them because they were approaching him from the flank and his eyes were fixed upon his goal. Then, at last, when he had covered nearly two-thirds of the distance to the cypress log where the wounded ibis stood, the dog, swerving aside to ​avoid a clump of lily-pads, awoke to his danger.
Panic, born of instinct inherited from a long line of woods-ranging forbears, swept over him like a wave. Had he held his straight course, he might have gained the little island of the cypress log, but his one thought was to get back to his master. The little old man heard his mad yelps of terror and saw him turn and strike out for the willow dyke. A gallant fight black Brutus made, swimming as he had never swum before, his small jet head jerking convulsively as he cried out to the master who had never failed him yet.
But from the beginning the odds were heavily against him. Those periscope eyes with the larger protruding nostril-knob in front were now sliding through the water at a rate exceeding the speed of the dog; and whereas black Brutus was swimming around the are of a wide half-circle, the 'gator was cutting straight across in a course which would intersect the are and which was bringing him each moment yards nearer to his prey. And the dog could not maintain the heart-breaking pace which he had set. Always the 'gator's speed was increasing while the dog's was diminishing. In his frenzy of terror black Brutus's strength seemed to have gone out of him—or else he was spending his strength with his breath in those shrill pitiful cries for help which went ringing and echoing along the ​cypress-walled margins and the moss-hung colonnades of the lagoon.
Red Cam, his brain awhirl, his sight dimming as the liquor took firmer grip upon him, nevertheless heard and understood. In a moment Marston saw him staggering along the dyke, breaking his way through the willows, shading his eyes with his hand as he peered out over the water. Drunk or sober, he could hardly fail to see the 'gator now, for not more than forty feet from the dog the great saurian came surging straight through a little floating island of lily-pads in his path, his grim head and fully eight feet of his jagged twelve-foot length visible above the surface.
Fascinated, Marston watched the drama, wondering why Cam did not shoot. Amazed, he saw Cam drop his gun and make his way precariously along a huge floating pine log projecting at right angles to the bank. Clear to the end of the long log he staggered, keeping his body upright by some miracle, and there for a moment he stood, shouting and waving his arms. Then, writhing and twisting in a vain effort to regain his balance, he pitched headlong into the dark water.
When, after a space of minutes the little old man looked again for the small jet head in the place where he had last seen it, black Brutus's race for life had ended.
​John Marston had charged at Chancellorsville and had endured the horrors of the last days before Appomattox. Despite his poet's soul and his gentleness, there was granite in him. He knew that Red Cam was dead. The coolest, clearest-headed man, enmeshed in the tough, clinging, tangled water-growths which spread their tentacles everywhere through the deep, still water into which Cam had fallen, could hardly have saved himself. It was death sudden and horrible, but the little old man was sensible of no thrill of horror. This was the justice of the wild. It was the woods god's vengeance. A ruthless foe of the woods creatures, a killer who killed in utter wantonness, would kill no more.
It would matter little to Cam Reppington if all that was mortal of him remained where it was for the present. Later Marston would walk to the nearest plantation house and bring back some negroes to get the body out. Just now he had a more pressing task before him.
A quarter of a mile away, safely hidden amid the reeds in a sequestered cove of the lagoon, was a small, flat-bottomed punt of which he made frequent use on his visits to the egret city. Presently he paddled in this punt close to the little island of the cypress log where Sanute the ibis, too wise to venture into those alligator-haunted waters, still ​waited, watching him suspiciously as he drew near.
"Well, old chief," said the little old man, "you're coming to live with me for a while. Maybe I can fix that wing or maybe you'll have to live with me always."
With a slow, soundless stroke of the paddle, he drove the punt a little nearer the log, ready to start in swift pursuit if the crippled bird took to the water.
"A close call, Sanute," he muttered, "a deucedly close call. But I said it and I was right. Red Cam the Killer will never lift your scalp."