Mrs. Woods often talked of Little Roll Over and its cunning ways; she hoped she would some time meet it again, and wondered how it would act if she should find it.

CHAPTER V.

THE NEST OF THE FISHING EAGLE.

Benjamin continued to attend the school, but it was evident that he did so with an injured heart, and chiefly out of love for the old chief, his father.  He had a high regard for his teacher, whose kindness was unfailing, and he showed a certain partiality for Gretchen; but he was as a rule silent, and there were dark lines on his forehead that showed that he was unhappy.  He would not be treated as an inferior, and he seemed to feel that he was so regarded by the scholars.

He began to show a peculiar kind of contempt for all of the pupils except Gretchen.  He pretended not to see them, hear them, or to be aware of their presence or existence.  He would pass through a group of boys as though the place was vacant, not so much as moving his eye from the direct path.  He came and went, solitary and self-contained, proud, cold, and revengeful.

But this indifference was caused by sensitiveness and the feeling that he had been slighted.  The dark lines relaxed, and his face wore a kindly glow whenever his teacher went to his desk—­if the split-log bench for a book-rest might be so called.  “I would give my life for Gretchen and you,” he said one day to Mr. Mann; and added:  “I would save them all for you.”

There was a cluster of gigantic trees close by the school-house, nearly two hundred feet high.  The trees, which were fir, had only dry stumps of limbs for a distance of nearly one hundred feet from the ground.  At the top, or near the top, the green leaves or needles and dead boughs had matted together and formed a kind of shelf or eyrie, and on this a pair of fishing eagles had made their nest.

The nest had been there many years, and the eagles had come back to it during the breeding season and reared their young.

For a time after the opening of the school none of the pupils seemed to give any special attention to this high nest.  It was a cheerful sight at noon to see the eagles wheel in the air, or the male eagle come from the glimmering hills and alight beside his mate.

One afternoon a sudden shadow like a falling cloud passed by the half-open shutter of the log school-house and caused the pupils to start.  There was a sharp cry of distress in the air, and the master looked out and said: 

“Attend to your books, children; it is only the eagle.”

But again and again the same swift shadow, like the fragment of a storm-cloud, passed across the light, and the wild scream of the bird caused the scholars to watch and to listen.  The cry was that of agony and affright, and it was so recognized by Benjamin, whose ear and eye were open to Nature, and who understood the voices and cries of the wild and winged inhabitants of the trees and air.