not even a king of all the birds, feels comfortable under the imminent possibility of losing an eye—­and such a haughty, wonderful eye, too.  Nor did the eagle.  And he showed it.  One presumes he might have abolished the pair—­one or both—­but the eagle never let on what he presumed.  What he knew was that he had nothing to gain in a fight with such super-hooligans, and everything to lose, for one wound only might mean a dead eagle via starvation and a dead raven—­what was a dead raven worth, anyway, to him, or anybody else?

Therefore the eagle changed his mind about continuing his course, which would have taken him above the ravens’ nest.  He did it grandly, and without giving the impression that the ravens had anything to do with it—­he could have squeezed the life out of them with one awful handshake, if his heart had been as big as his claws.  But they had something to do with it.  And they knew it.  So did Cob, who laughed again, hoarsely and as one appreciating a joke, while he wheeled and wheeled over the following waves, seeing all things and never appearing to see anything.

Then at last, when the king of all the birds had sunk, like a speck of floating burnt paper, away over the far, white-mantled hills, the ravens suddenly evaporated into nowhere.  Probably no one had seen them go except Cob, and Cob was by now a lonely, dwindling speck away over the restless ocean.  Then he was not.  He was coming back, swinging along with great, easy, shallow half-flaps, so sublimely lazy that he seemed merely to swim through the gale.  But he covered distance; there was speed as well as majesty in his flight, for all that.

In a very short time he was above the cliffs, silent, sinister, almost stealthy.  One of the ravens came back suddenly, diving over the crest, half-demented with anxiety to cover her eggs from that stony stare of the sea-rover; and Cob, seeing where she had come from, surrendered himself to the gale, hurtled down-wind, veered, tacked, circled, rocking, and came down in a series of his oblique plunges—­smack-bang into the middle of a gory dinner-party, consisting of the male raven, five gray or hooded crows, and one silver herring-gull, feasting upon the carcass of a dead sheep.

Every head went up, every eye blinked, every wing half-opened, every beak shut tight as Cob, whom everybody had thought to be miles away by that time, threw forward his wings, umbrella-fashion, flung them up, hat-fashion, fanning wide his tail, dropped his giant webbed feet, and came to anchor with a rush.  Then he folded those wonderful pinions of his, foot by rustling foot, stared stonily at the amazed, mute company around him, and, throwing back his immaculate, smooth, low-browed, spotless head, laughed to the winds, hoarsely, loudly, wildly—­a rude, baleful, transport of mirth: 

“How-how-how-how-how!”