Down clapped the pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so easy to see.  But it was no good.  Up shot the dozen heads above the herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity with empty-headed inquisitiveness.

He almost melted into the ground, but it was useless.  An old, old hen—­who perhaps was ignored by the lord of the harem, and hoped for an adventure—­waddled up, stood within a yard of his crouched, rounded shape without seeing him, saw him, shot straight up in the air at least one foot, screaming for help, and promptly charged blindly into the hedge, where she as promptly got held up among roots and twigs.

The old pheasant got to his feet just as the rooster who owned the outfit came racing up, panting and red.  He had heard a wife scream for help.  Perhaps it was the odd bird out; or, anyway, some one who had to be abolished.  And he never waited to think.  He saw what might have been a small cockerel (if it had been large he might have thought twice) crouching, and—­he just sailed right in.

Then something happened.  The two met, going up breast to breast.  For a moment or two the cock-pheasant showed on or about that big rooster.  Some feathers hung in the air.  The rooster sat on his heels, met by a blow in the chest that seemed to take all the wind from his sails, so to speak, and would have drawn off to reconsider things if he had not promptly become more busy than ever before in his life.

It was over ere any one knew quite what was happening.  The old cock-pheasant had passed through the crowd and vanished at the double down the hedge, and the big rooster was slowly subsiding into a pool of his own blood, from which he was destined never to rise again.

But those who make, instead of following, their own destiny do not get let off thus lightly in the wild.  The pheasant had not gone a hundred yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head.  The bird fell in his tracks where he ran, as if some one had jerked his legs from under him, and he peered out.

What he beheld was an under-keeper standing close by and blowing upon a two-note pea-whistle till there seemed some danger that he would burst his cheeks, or a blood-vessel, on the spot, and far up the field three wandering pheasants racing back to the covert, as they thought, for very life; but, as a matter of fact—­and you shall see—­it was to very death.  The blower of whistles was stationed there to drive back into the covert any pheasants who were so misguided as to wish to roam thence into the fields and away.

Now, that old reprobate of a pheasant of ours was a pretty confirmed runner, anyway.  He had trained himself to it.  Yet never in all his checkered life was he conscious of a more awful desire to flee by means of the wings that God had given him.  The weakness was over in a few seconds, and he crept on; but it was a near thing while it lasted.  He passed, however, away from the danger zone, resisting temptation, and it was as well.