crows, however, were his best asset. They quarreled, and were
loquacious, and, in fact, they made a most infernal noise; and he had
stated that the noise was necessary to his success. This would seem as
if eagles hunt by sound as well as by sight. Pig Head was the first
person I ever heard that suggested so. But, be that as it may, the
racket increased as the sun, robed in purple, gold, and crimson splendor,
rose over the mountain-tops; and with the sun came the only bird, so the
ancients tell us, who can look the sun full in the face without
blinking--_Aquila_, the eagle.

But--make no mistake about this point--he who came then, grandly, proudly
sweeping over the blue, dim ridges, was not the Chieftain himself, for
this was not the Chieftain's territory, but the Chieftain's son; he who
lived, as you will remember, upon the other, or south, side of Loch Royal.

Haughtily, statelily, as a king might go to his throne, so did the
Chieftain's son let himself down, in stupendous hundred-foot spirals, to
a pinnacle of rock, jagged, saw-edged, and perpendicular, about two
hundred yards away; and the ravens and the gray crows, who saw him
coming, made great and sudden hostile outcry at first, and then, as he
folded, foot by foot, his immense pinions about him, and sat there erect,
with his piercing, scowling gaze bent upon _them_, they were dumb.

And Pig Head, aching with cramp and cold in his hiding-place, knew that
_the_ quarry was at hand. But if you think, because the eagle was at
hand, that the time was at hand too, you don't know eagles. They may be,
upon occasion, as quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as
slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand,
haughty, unbending _Aquila chrysoetus_, that golden eagle, sat. I say,
he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of
it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he
sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that
occasionally--say at fifteen-minute intervals--he winked a yellow-lidded
wink. And the wink was almost as unlifelike and uncanny as the bird.

And the gray crows and the ravens gulped and quarreled, with one eye upon
the eagle and one upon their job; and Pig Head--Pig Head sat and cursed
that eagle, from his horny beak to his barred tail, through
chattering--and aching--teeth. But the eagle never moved a feather.

* * * * *