Then a speck grew out of the heights, out of the west and the dark, and growing and growing momentarily, became a rustling, sinister, untidy, heavy shape, which anon settled upon a rock, and croaked, “Glock! glock!” twice, almost like a bark, in a deep and sepulchral voice.  To it was added another sable form, coming down from the lonely stony heights, and the two sat together, remarking, as they looked—­but their wonderful eyes must have seen it very far away—­at the bait.  It was the wild cat turned inside-out, and other things, on a slab outside the aperture before mentioned, that was at one end of Pig Head’s hiding-place.  And the black specters were ravens.

“Ou!” they said; then “Aw!” then again “Ou!” One remarked “Augh!” and the other agreed—­or, it may have been, disagreed—­with an “Au!”

Evidently the wild cat, in a disguise in which he would not have known even his own self, looked very enticing, and he and the situation generally were being discussed from all points of view.

I say from all points of view advisedly, because, although the ravens discoursed much over their council of war, they would not come within a hundred yards, and it was a voice from the semi-dark, or western, side which finally stayed them in the very act of unfolding their big, rounded wings to fly away.

“Krar-krar-krar!” rasped the voice; and the ravens folded their wings again to wait and see!

It was a gray crow, and the ravens knew that never was gray crow an innocent lost in the wilderness.

If the gray, or hoodie, crow—­always remembering that crows, gray or black, are servants of the Devil, just as ravens are, and very cunning—­if the crow, I say, thought that here was food without some horrible form of hidden death lurking behind it, then the chances were the gray crow was right.  They knew “hoodie,” you see.  Anyway, if they let him go first, and he was wrong, then it would be his funeral, not theirs.

Wherefore the gray crow went first to the bait, and Pig Head, half-dead with cold and peering out of a tiny peep-hole, called down blessings of a weak and watery nature upon his black head.  And well he might, for if the gray crow had shied at the bait, then everybody else would have taken his tip.

They took his tip now, for in a few minutes there was a “hurrr-hrrr-hrrr” of wings, and, one after the other, down came the ravens.

Anon the ravens were joined by a third, volplaning from some cloud-covered peak, where he must have been watching all the time; and the crow was joined by four accomplices, who just drifted up from nowhere special, as gray crows have a habit of doing when there is carrion afoot.