barrel, swore with vexation. The eagle had launched forward from his perch and was flapping directly away from them over the marsh, the trunk and branches of the tree screening him from a wing shot.
Of the two, Hawley, an inveterate hunter, was the better woodsman. He was confident that the eagle had not detected their presence; and knowing the ways of bald eagles, he believed that this eagle, though of a different species, might presently return to the lone dead oak, which was probably one of his regular lookout stations. It was at York's suggestion that the two hunters remained in their ambush for a while and presently saw something which Mat Norman would not have missed for worlds.
The golden eagle of the Smokies did not know, as he spiraled upward over the marsh plain, that he had escaped death by a hair. He had not seen the hunters in the myrtle clump behind him. What he had seen was a dark speck against the bright blue sky bent above the marshes—a dark speck which swung round and round in interweaving circles, gradually drawing nearer.
His keen eyes told him that it was an eagle. Long ago he had learned that these eagles of the coast were not of his kind; yet, urged on by that vague discontent which had troubled him ever since the
