he had seen peering around the chestnut limb. This was the most exasperating mishap of all, not only because of the other failures which had preceded it, but also because the falcon had felt very sure of his game. Though they were fairly fast flyers, logcocks were not adepts in aërial strategy; and this one, detected in an exposed place, should have fallen an easy victim to the superbly swift and marvelously agile peregrine.
Perhaps this logcock was wilier than most. Perhape it was mainly luck, combined with overconfidence on the falcon's part, which caused Cloud King to miss once more. At any rate, the big woodpecker, after uttering that first shriek of terror which had startled the gobbler into flight, had done the one thing that could save him.
Instead of fleeing at top speed, in which case he would have been overtaken in a few seconds, he had dived almost straight downward and, narrowly missing the flying gobbler in his descent, had plunged headforemost into the dense cover of the kalmia thicket clothing the slope of the ridge. Cloud King, whizzing through the air like a rifle bullet, had clutched at him with curved needle-pointed talons just as he began his plunge; but the logcock's unexpected dive had saved him, and the falcon, nonplused for an instant, had seen his hoped-for
