panionship which he desired without understanding that he desired it. But it was companionship of a sort; and mile after mile slipped past beneath him, and before he realized it he had traveled beyond the frontiers of his own domain.
Having journeyed so far, it was perhaps only natural that he should follow his new comrade throughout the rest of that day. Hence when dusk fell and the bald eagle, still some forty miles short of the barrier island which was his ultimate goal, sought a lodging for the night in a great swamp well within the bounds of the Low Country, the wanderer from the Smokies found himself, a few minutes later, at rest in a dense wood of tall straight-stemmed trees not utterly unlike the familiar balsams of his mountains.
If the feathery-foliaged cypresses, in spite of their ghostly draperies of gray Spanish moss, faintly recalled the fir forests of his upland home, all else was new and strange. Darkness quickly shut the surrounding woods from his view; but these woods were full of night noises such as he had never heard before; noises which oppressed even his bold spirit with a sense of vague disquiet. The noises—sometimes low and guttural, sometimes hoarse and loud—came from tall trees fifty yards to his left, where the dry floor of the swamp sloped gently down to the edge of a small lagoon; and the eagle did not
