the duck armies, the gray eagle had devoted himself to other prey. Day followed day uneventfully. Then, one still sunny morning as the lone drake feasted on water snails along the edge of a little peninsula of reeds, a black log lying half submerged near the margin came suddenly to life.
As the 'gator rushed, the drake, with a hoarse startled cry, opened his wings and launched upward from the surface. On and on he flew, rising higher and higher; on and on for fifty yards, a hundred, five hundred. His wings beat evenly and strongly. No sudden weakness or numbness assailed him. At first he flew due south, the direction in which he happened to be headed when the 'gator charged him; but gradually he swung in a wide half-circle until his long bill and slender neck pointed north.
The green marshes and the shimmering blue lagoons slid past beneath him. Far in front, a thousand miles away, a placid prairie lake, where perhaps his mate was swimming with her little ones, beckoned and lured him on.
The tyrant was taking his ease. In the frosty, windless upper air, so far above the earth that to the eyes of a man he would have appeared no larger than a gnat, he floated on outstretched wings as lightly as the white wisps of cloud drifting near him. This was his true kingdom, this lofty illim-
