ut their wonderful eyes
must have seen it very far away--at the bait. It was the wild cat turned
inside-out, and other things, on a slab outside the aperture before
mentioned, that was at one end of Pig Head's hiding-place. And the black
specters were ravens.

"Ou!" they said; then "Aw!" then again "Ou!" One remarked "Augh!" and
the other agreed--or, it may have been, disagreed--with an "Au!"

Evidently the wild cat, in a disguise in which he would not have known
even his own self, looked very enticing, and he and the situation
generally were being discussed from all points of view.

I say from all points of view advisedly, because, although the ravens
discoursed much over their council of war, they would not come within a
hundred yards, and it was a voice from the semi-dark, or western, side
which finally stayed them in the very act of unfolding their big, rounded
wings to fly away.

"Krar-krar-krar!" rasped the voice; and the ravens folded their wings
again to wait and see!

It was a gray crow, and the ravens knew that never was gray crow an
innocent lost in the wilderness.

If the gray, or hoodie, crow--always remembering that crows, gray or
black, are servants of the Devil, just as ravens are, and very
cunning--if the crow, I say, thought that here was food without some
horrible form of hidden death lurking behind it, then the chances were
the gray crow was right. They knew "hoodie," you see. Anyway, if they
let him go first, and he was wrong, then it would be _his_ funeral, not
theirs.

Wherefore the gray crow went first to the bait, and Pig Head, half-dead
with cold and peering out of a tiny peep-hole, called down blessings of a
weak and watery nature upon his black head. And well he might, for if
the gray crow had shied at the bait, then everybody else would have taken
his tip.

They took his tip now, for in a few minutes there was a "hurrr-hrrr-hrrr"
of wings, and, one after the other, down came the ravens.

Anon the ravens were joined by a third, volplaning from some
cloud-covered peak, where he must have been watching all the time; and
the crow was joined by four accomplices, who just drifted up from nowhere
special, as gray crows have a habit of doing when there is carrion afoot.

But Pig Head had not come there to entertain ravens, nor was he at that
moment laying up a store of lumbago for the purpose of gratuitously
feeding disreputable gray crows. He had other quarry in view. The gray