ys treat their wounded well, and
there would be no chance, no earthly chance at all, of his finding a
place in all that vast horizon of sea and sky and island where they,
the ceaseless, never-resting "White Patrol," would not eventually find
him.

Then the skua lay down, and thereafter surrendered himself to that
utter reaction which birds, who live more intensely in action than
almost any other creatures, have brought to an apparently exaggerated
pitch. He did not sleep, but he did not move, and every muscle in him,
every fiber, every nerve, faculty, organ, was surrendered utterly to
rest.

Night came fluttering her sable wings across the scene, breathing and
sighing audibly in the first silence that wild landscape of storms and
squalls had known throughout the day, and the skua moved. His neck
went up straight, and his head turned, looking sharply this way and
that, fierce apprehension written upon him.

There was nothing one could see to give cause for this. A flock of
curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a
string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those
beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to
the shores of the inlet. Far out to sea a black line, which might have
been a sea-serpent if it hadn't been scoter ducks, trailed undulating
over the waves, and a single great white gannet plunged from aloft into
the deep at intervals with a report like a sunset gun. But they were
all innocent, except in the opinion of the fish and shell-fish, and no
manner of folk to trouble the pirate skua. Set a thief to catch a
thief, however. And, besides, there was blood on the bird and around
him, or the taint of it, and blood is the devil and all in the wild.
There was nothing to be _seen_. No. That was the worst part of it.
It was what was unseen that the skua was thinking about.

Wherefore, then, our friend of the pirate rig rose and walked stiffly
to the summit of one of the bowlder-rocks right at the water's edge.
He was by no means recovered yet, or in any condition for a fight in
that desolate scene, and had to select the most strategic position he
could crawl to. He did, and awaited Fate's reply.

The day died, and the moon came out to wink and dodge and play a
foolish game of hide-and-seek in and out among the clouds. She showed
the skua, a black knob atop of the black blob of his bowlder,
apparently fast asleep, invisible if we did no