Suddenly he saw a dark shadow moving along the sunlit ground.  It swept past him.  He looked up to see a great bird with wide wings sailing far above.  He saw another still higher, and then a third.  He looked at the hilltop.  The quiet, black birds had taken wing.  They were floating slowly, majestically upward.  He watched their graceful flight.  How easily they swooped in wide circles.  He remembered that they had fascinated him when a boy, long, long ago, when he had a home.  Where was that home?  He had one once.  Ah! the long, cruel years have rolled back.  A youth blotted out by evil returned.  He saw a little cottage, he saw the old Virginia homestead, he saw his brothers and his mother.

“Ah-h!” A cruel agony tore his heart.  He leaned hard against the knife.  With the pain the present returned, but the past remained.  All his youth, all his manhood flashed before him.  The long, bloody, merciless years faced him, and his crimes crushed upon him with awful might.

Suddenly a rushing sound startled him.  He saw a great bird swoop down and graze the tree tops.  Another followed, and another, and then a flock of them.  He saw their gray, spotted breasts and hooked beaks.

“Buzzards,” he muttered, darkly eyeing the dead savages.  The carrion birds were swooping to their feast.

“By God!  He’s nailed me fast for buzzards!” he screamed in sudden, awful frenzy.  “Nailed fast!  Ah-h!  Ah-h!  Ah-h!  Eaten alive by buzzards!  Ah-h!  Ah-h!  Ah-h!”

He shrieked until his voice failed, and then he gasped.

Again the buzzards swooped overhead, this time brushing the leaves.  One, a great grizzled bird, settled upon a limb of the giant oak, and stretched its long neck.  Another alighted beside him.  Others sailed round and round the dead tree top.

The leader arched his wings, and with a dive swooped into the glade.  He alighted near Deering’s dead body.  He was a dark, uncanny bird, with long, scraggy, bare neck, a wreath of white, grizzled feathers, a cruel, hooked beak, and cold eyes.

The carrion bird looked around the glade, and put a great claw on the dead man’s breast.

“Ah-h!  Ah-h!” shrieked Girty.  His agonized yell of terror and horror echoed mockingly from the wooded bluff.

The huge buzzard flapped his wings and flew away, but soon returned to his gruesome feast.  His followers, made bold by their leader, floated down into the glade.  Their black feathers shone in the sun.  They hopped over the moss; they stretched their grizzled necks, and turned their heads sideways.

Girty was sweating blood.  It trickled from his ghastly face.  All the suffering and horror he had caused in all his long career was as nothing to that which then rended him.  He, the renegade, the white Indian, the Deathshead of the frontier, panted and prayed for a merciful breath.  He was exquisitely alive.  He was human.

Presently the huge buzzard, the leader, raised his hoary head.  He saw the man nailed to the tree.  The bird bent his head wisely to one side, and then lightly lifted himself into the air.  He sailed round the glade, over the fighting buzzards, over the spring, and over the doomed renegade.  He flew out of the glade, and in again.  He swooped close to Girty.  His broad wings scarcely moved as he sailed along.