victim drop like a plummet into the impenetrable kalmias some fifty feet below.
It was then that Cloud King, poising in the air above the spot where the logcock had vanished, saw the great gobbler shooting past beneath him; and it was then that his pent-up fury, intensified no doubt by hunger and by the excitement of his lightninglike assault on the logcock, impelled him to attempt the most spectacular exploit of his strenuous career.
Ordinarily the peregrine would never have attacked so large a bird as a twenty-pound wild gobbler. It was not that he lacked courage for such an enterprise, but simply that the instinct of his race, fixed through countless generations, would not have suggested the wild turkey as prey. The peregrine, or duck hawk, among the swiftest and most courageous of all the hawk kind, lives chiefly on wild ducks and other water fowl, where these are to be found; but in the high mountain country, where such game was rare, Cloud King, the peregrine of Devilhead Peak, levied tribute on such upland wild folk as grouse, quail, rabbits, doves and various forest birds. It had never occurred to him to seek a victim among the wild turkeys which still frequented certain parts of the mountain woods. In fact, because turkeys were rather rare and in general kept pretty carefully under cover, he had seen
