stronger than the terror which urged her to spread her wings and fly.
This time the tyrant came more swiftly, driving through the air with powerful surging strokes which forced his big body forward at high speed. Ten feet behind the two swimming shovellers a coot gave a shrill cackling cry, opened his wings and struggled to lift himself from the surface. A dead weight pulled him back, a weight which clung to his right foot and held him fast. Desperately his wings beat the water, making a mighty commotion; and the tyrant, poising at that instant fifty feet above the pool, half closed his broad marbled pinions and plunged.
The female shoveller dived; the crippled drake, hampered by his broken wing, got himself under water a last. But the fierce eyes of the tyrant had not been fixed upon either of the shovellers. His target was the struggling coot; and the latter, unable either to dive or to fly because of the big terrapin which had fastened itself to his foot, was gripped and crushed in an instant by the tyrant's long curved claws. A moment the eagle's dark-gray wings labored mightily, their serrated tips brushing the water. Then the terrapin's hold gave way and the tyrant heaved upward with his prize.
Day followed day in the long, marsh-encircled
