He raised his hand.

“May I go see?”

The master bowed silently.  The boy glided out of the door, and was heard to exclaim: 

“Look! look! the nest—­the nest!”

The master granted the school a recess, and all in a few moments were standing without the door peering into the tall trees.

The long dry weather and withering sun had caused the dead boughs to shrink and to break beneath the great weight of the nest that rested upon them.  The eagle’s nest was in ruins.  It had fallen upon the lower boughs, and two young half-fledged eaglets were to be seen hanging helplessly on a few sticks in mid-air and in danger of falling to the ground.

It was a bright afternoon.  The distress of the two birds was pathetic, and their cries called about them other birds, as if in sympathy.

The eagles seldom descended to any point near the plain in their flight, but mounted, as it were, to the sun, or floated high in the air; but in their distress this afternoon they darted downward almost to the ground, as though appealing for help for their young.

While the school was watching this curious scene the old chief of the Umatillas came up the cool highway or trail, to go home with Benjamin after school.

The eagles seemed to know him.  As he joined the pitying group, the female eagle descended as in a spasm of grief, and her wing swept his plume.  She uttered a long, tremulous cry as she passed and ascended to her young.

“She call,” said the old chief.  “She call me.”

“I go,” said Benjamin, with a look at his father.

“Yes, go—­she call.  She call—­the God overhead he call.  Go!”

A slender young pine ran up beside one of the giant trees, tall and green.  In a moment Benjamin was seen ascending this pine to a point where he could throw himself upon the smallest of the great trees and grasp the ladder of the lower dead branches.  Up and up he went in the view of all, until he had reached a height of some hundred and fifty feet.

The eagles wheeled around him, describing higher circles as he ascended.  He reached the young eagles at last, but passed by them.  What was he going to do?

There was a shelf of green boughs above him, which would bear the weight of a nest.  He went up to them at a distance of nearly two hundred feet.  He then began to gather up the fallen sticks of the old nest, and to break off new sticks and to construct a new nest.  The old chief watched him with pride, and, turning to the master, said: 

“Ah-a—­that is my boy.  He be me.  I was he once—­it is gone now—­what I was.”

When Benjamin had made a nest he descended, and at the peril of his own life, on the decayed limbs, he rescued the two young eagles that were hanging with heads downward and open beaks.  He carried them up to the new nest and placed them in it, and began to descend.

But a withered bough that he grasped was too slender for his weight, and broke.  He grasped another, but that too gave way.  He tried to drop into the top of the tall young pine below him, but, in his effort to get into position to do so, limb after limb of dead wood broke, and he came falling to the earth, amid the startled looks of the chief and the cries of the children.