d with blood. At last something
gave way. There was a ghastly cry that was like the cry of neither bird
nor beast, a weak flutter of wings, and Gargantua of the Air staggered
up into the treetops and fell with a crash among the thick boughs of the
spruce.

Peter raised himself weakly, the severed leg of the owl dropping from
his jaws. He was half blinded. Every muscle in his body seemed to be
torn and bleeding, yet in his discomfort the thrilling conviction came
to him that he had won. He tensed himself for another attack, hugging
the ground closely as he watched and waited, but no attack came. He
could hear the flutter and wheeze of his maimed adversary, and slowly he
drew himself back--still facing the scene of battle--until in a farther
patch of gloom he turned once more to his business of following the
trail of Jolly Roger McKay.

There was no mark of bravado in his advance now. If he had possessed
an over-growing confidence, Gargantua's attack had set it back, and he
stole like a shifty fox through the night. Driven into his brain was the
knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the snapping
beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little attention
had now become a deadly menace. His egoism had suffered a jolt,
a healthful reaction from its too swift ascendency. He sensed the
narrowness of his escape without the mental action of reasoning it out,
and his injuries were secondary to the oppressive horror of the uncanny
combat out of which he had come alive. Yet this horror was not a fear.
Heretofore he had recognized the ghostly owl-shapes of night more or
less as a curious part of darkness, inspiring neither like nor dislike
in him. Now he hated them, and ever after his fangs gleamed white when
one of them floated over his head.

He was badly hurt. There were ragged tears in his flank and back, and a
last stroke of Gargantua's talons had stabbed his shoulder to the bone.
Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was closing, so that shapes
and shadows were grotesquely dim in the night. Instinct and caution, and
the burning pains in his body, urged him to lie down in a thicket and
wait for the day. But stronger than these were memory of the girl's
urging voice, the vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and
the freshness of Jolly Roger's trail as it kept straight on through the
forest's moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom.

It was in the first graying light of July d