Then came the rain-shower.  Not that there was anything in that.  Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes used to do to maidens’ cheeks—­rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of swift storm phenomena.  But behind the rain-shower, or in it, maybe—­it blotted out cliff and inlet and sandbar and heather-covered hills, and, with the wind, whipped the sea into spume like an egg-whisk—­came he, the storm pirate.

A guillemot—­you know the guillemot, the fish-hunter, who flies under the waters more easily than she flies the air above the waters—­had risen, and was making inshore with a full catch, when the squall caught her without warning.  For a little she faced it, her wings whirring madly, her body suspended in mid-air, but she not making headway one inch against the sudden fury of a forty-mile-an-hour wind.  Then, since she could no longer see the shore, which was blotted out with hissing rain, she turned and ran down-wind, like a drawn streak, to the lee of a big stack of rock.

The next that was seen of her, she was heading out to sea at top speed, in wake of the rain-shower and the squall, which had passed as suddenly as it had come; and behind her, pursuing her with a relentless fury that made one gasp, shot another and a strange bird-shape.  Its lines were the lines of the true pirate; its wings long and sharp-cut; its beak wickedly hooked at the tip; its claws curved, for no gentle purpose, at the end of its webbed feet; its eye fierce and haughty; its uniform the color of the very stormcloud that had just passed—­dun and smoked cream below, and sooty above.  True, he was not big, being only twenty-one inches—­two inches less than the herring-gull.  But what is size, anyway?  It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the “devil,” the armament, and the appalling speed.  Just as a professional boxer of any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out anything there in that scene that he chose—­almost.

The guillemot flew as never in all her life had she flown before, and every known artifice of dodging she had heard of she tried, and—­it all failed.  The terrible new bird gained all the time steadily, following her as if towed by an invisible string, till at last he was above her, his wonderful wild scream was ringing in her ears, his cruel eyes glaring into hers, his beak snapping in her very face, his claws a-clutch.

No, thank you.  In sheer terror she opened her beak and dropped her fish.  It fell like a column of silver, and in a flash her pursuer was gone—­nay, was not gone; had turned, rather, into a second column, a sooty one, falling like a thunderbolt, till he overtook even the falling fish, and wonderfully snatched it up in his hooked bill ere ever it could touch the waves, without a word or explanation of any kind whatever.

That, apparently, was his manner of getting his living; a strange manner, a peculiar way—­the way of the pirate on the ocean.