however, was not there, but his tail was, and
the side-striped one got a mouthful of the bushy black tip of that.
Whereupon Mesomelas recoiled on himself, and for a moment a horrible
"worry" followed, at the end of which the other dropped limply again,
this time, apparently, really done for.

Very, very gingerly the black-back--himself a red and weird sight in
the eye of the moon--approached, and seized and shook the foe, dropped
him, and--again that foe was a leaping streak at his throat.

Mesomelas side-stepped, and neatly chopped--a terrible, wrenching
bite--at his hindleg in passing. It fetched him over, and he lay
still, the moon shining on his side, doubly and redly striped now.

This time it was Mesomelas who sprang at his throat--to be met by
fangs. But in the quarter of an instant, changing his mind after he
sprang, he shot clean up in the air, and came down to one side, and,
rebounding like a ball, had the other by the neck.

For one instant he kept there, hung, wrenching ghastlily, then sprung
clear, and, backing slowly, limping, growling horribly, flat-eared and
beaten, the side-striped jackal began his slow, backward retreat into
the heart of the nearly impenetrable thorns, where the winner was not
such a fool as to follow him. And the black-backed jackal never saw
him again. Living or dead, he faded out of our jackal's life forever.

And when he turned, his wife was standing at the entrance to the
"earth" alone. The other, the female side-striped jackal's form, could
be dimly seen dissolving into the night--on three legs.

"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya!" howled Mesomelas.

XIII

THE STORM PIRATE

The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast.
Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar
petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck,
oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled,
inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to
themselves--to themselves in their thousands. Their only shadow was
the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not
professional, pirates, were too clumsy to worry too much.

Then came the rain-shower. Not that there was anything in that.
Rain-showers came to that land as easily as blushes _used_ to do to
maidens' cheeks--rain-showers, and sudden squalls, and all manner of
swift storm phenomena. But behind the rain-shower, or in it, maybe--it
blotted out cliff an