But Pig Head had not come there to entertain ravens, nor was he at that moment laying up a store of lumbago for the purpose of gratuitously feeding disreputable gray crows.  He had other quarry in view.  The gray crows, however, were his best asset.  They quarreled, and were loquacious, and, in fact, they made a most infernal noise; and he had stated that the noise was necessary to his success.  This would seem as if eagles hunt by sound as well as by sight.  Pig Head was the first person I ever heard that suggested so.  But, be that as it may, the racket increased as the sun, robed in purple, gold, and crimson splendor, rose over the mountain-tops; and with the sun came the only bird, so the ancients tell us, who can look the sun full in the face without blinking—­Aquila, the eagle.

But—­make no mistake about this point—­he who came then, grandly, proudly sweeping over the blue, dim ridges, was not the Chieftain himself, for this was not the Chieftain’s territory, but the Chieftain’s son; he who lived, as you will remember, upon the other, or south, side of Loch Royal.

Haughtily, statelily, as a king might go to his throne, so did the Chieftain’s son let himself down, in stupendous hundred-foot spirals, to a pinnacle of rock, jagged, saw-edged, and perpendicular, about two hundred yards away; and the ravens and the gray crows, who saw him coming, made great and sudden hostile outcry at first, and then, as he folded, foot by foot, his immense pinions about him, and sat there erect, with his piercing, scowling gaze bent upon them, they were dumb.

And Pig Head, aching with cramp and cold in his hiding-place, knew that the quarry was at hand.  But if you think, because the eagle was at hand, that the time was at hand too, you don’t know eagles.  They may be, upon occasion, as quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as slow as the wrath of Heaven.  And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbending Aquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat.  I say, he sat.  And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it.  He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally—­say at fifteen-minute intervals—­he winked a yellow-lidded wink.  And the wink was almost as unlifelike and uncanny as the bird.

And the gray crows and the ravens gulped and quarreled, with one eye upon the eagle and one upon their job; and Pig Head—­Pig Head sat and cursed that eagle, from his horny beak to his barred tail, through chattering—­and aching—­teeth.  But the eagle never moved a feather.

* * * * * *

We are told that Alexander sighed for other worlds to conquer.  So it was with the Chieftain, who was not Alexander.

After his wife had gone a-hunting eastward—­a wonderful and gigantic silhouette floating and dwindling into the furnace of the rising sun—­the Chieftain sat upon his ledge of rock, staring across the gleaming, painted, glassy expanse of Loch Royal, southward, to the dominions of his son.