t
all to pieces at that distance!"

"You'll never bring it down with a bullet?" said Mona eagerly.

"Not, eh? Perhaps not."

The great eagle, jet black save for her yellow feet standing out against
the thick dusky plumage, floated round and round in her grand gyrations,
her flaming eye visible to the spectators as she turned her head from
side to side. Roden, without dismounting, put up his rifle.
Simultaneously with the report a cloud of black feathers flew from the
noble bird, who, as though with untamable determination to disappoint
her slayer, shot downward obliquely, with arrow-like velocity, and
disappeared beyond the brow of the cliff overhead.

"You were right," said Roden, slipping a fresh cartridge into his piece.
"I did not bring it down, for with characteristic perversity, the
ill-conditioned biped has chosen to yield up the ghost at the top of the
cliff, whereas we are at the bottom."

"Oh, can't we go up to it? This is much better game than those poor
little rhybok. But, wherever did you learn to shoot like that?"

"We can go up!" he replied, purposely or accidentally evading the last
question. "That gully we passed, a little way back is climbable. But
you had better wait below. It will be hard work."

"So that's how you propose taking care of me--to leave me all alone?
Not if I know it. The place looked perfectly safe."

Safe it was: a narrow, staircase-like _couloir_, consisting of a series
of natural steps; the rocks on either side heavily festooned with thick
masses of the most beautiful maidenhair fern. Leaving the horses
beneath, they began the climb, and after a couple of hundred feet of
this they stood on the summit of the mountain.

The summit was as flat as a table, and covered with long coarse grass,
billowing in the fresh strong breeze which swept it like the surface of
a lake. Around, beneath, free and vast, spread the rolling panorama of
mountain and plain.

"Ah! this is to live indeed!" broke from Mona. "I don't know that I
ever enjoyed a day so much in my life."

The other did not immediately look at her, but when he presently did
steal a keen, but furtive glance at her face, there was something there,
which, combined with the tone wherein she had uttered the above words,
set him thinking.

"I don't see anything of the _dasje-vanger_," he said, at length; "and
yet this is about the place where it should have fallen. It may have
fluttered into the long grass, but c