dog, the egg-thief, who had no business there with his yolk-spattered, slobbering jaws, plundering the homes of the wild feathered ones—­he who was only a tame slave, and a bad one at that.  But the dog followed the polecat into a jungle-like reed fastness, and—­almost never came out again!  When he did, it was to the accompaniment of varied and assorted howls, and at about the biggest thing in the speed line he had ever evolved.  He was no end glad to get out, and the distant haze swallowed him wonderfully quickly, still howling every yard of the way—­for, mark you, that polecat’s teeth, once felt, wore nothing to laugh at or forget.

These things he accomplished as the night was beginning to fall, and the solemn eye of the setting sun—­such an eye of such a setting sun as the estuary alone knows; bloodshot, and in a sky asmoke as of cities burning—­regarded him as he finished and stood back outside as one who considers.  He was a grim figure of outlawry and rapine, alone there in that lonely place, amidst the gathering, dank gray of the marsh mists, the red rays touching his coat and turning it to deep purple, and his eyes to dull ruby flame; a beast, once seen, you would not forget, and could never mistake.

But his work was not yet done.  He was hungry again, but for him there could be no more food yet, and he turned with the same immutable and dumbly dogged air that characterized so many of his actions, and made off down the “sea-bank.”  Once he hid—­vanished utterly would better express it—­to avoid the passage of an eel-spearer, an inhabitant of the estuary almost as amphibious and mysterious as himself.  Once he very nearly caught a low-flying snipe as he leapt up at it while cutting low over the top of the “bank”; and once—­here he sprang aside with a half-stifled snarl and every bristle erect—­he was very nearly caught by a horrible steel-toothed trap, set there to entertain that same dog we have already met, by reason of the small matter of a late lamb or two that had suddenly developed bites, obviously not self-inflicted, in the night.  Then he crossed the dike at the foot of the sea-wall, shook himself, sat down to scratch, and straightway hurled himself backwards and to one side, as something that resembled a javelin whizzed out of six straggling, upright, faded, tawny reeds at the water’s edge, by which he had sat down.  The javelin struck deep into the little circle of lightly-pressed-down grass where his haunches had rested, and he caught a glimpse, or only a half-glimpse, of weird onyx eyes, and heard strange and shuddery reptilian hissings.  Eyes and noises might have belonged to a crocodile, or some huge lizard thing, or snapping turtle, but the javelin was clearly the property of no such horror, and was very obviously a beak—­now, by the way, withdrawn.