looked to Horner like a
mere scratch across the face of the mountain.

"There's where his nest is, sure!" muttered Horner to himself. And
remembering that cold challenge in the bird's yellow stare, he
suddenly decided that he wanted to see an eagle's nest. He had plenty
of time. He was in no particular hurry to get back to the settlement
and the gossip of the cross-roads store. He turned his canoe to land,
lifted her out and hid her in the bushes, and struck back straight for
the face of "Old Baldy."

The lower slope was difficult to climb, a tangle of tumbled boulders
and fallen trunks, mantled in the soundless gloom of the fir-forest.
Skilled woodsman though he was, Horner's progress was so slow, and the
windless heat became so oppressive to his impatience, that he was
beginning to think of giving up the idle venture, when suddenly he
came face to face with a perpendicular and impassable wall of cliff.
This curt arrest to his progress was just what was needed to stiffen
his wavering resolution. He understood the defiance which his ready
fancy had found in the stare of the eagle. Well, he had accepted the
challenge. He would not be baffled by a rock. If he could not climb
over it, he would go round it; but he would find the nest.

With an obstinate look in his eyes, Horner began to work his way along
the foot of the cliff towards the right. Taking advantage of every
inch of ascent that he could gain, he at last found, to his
satisfaction, that he had made sufficient height to clear the gloom of
the woods. As he looked out over their tops, a light breeze cooled his
wet forehead, and he pressed on with fresh vigor. Presently the slope
grew a trifle easier, the foothold surer, and he mounted more rapidly.
The steely lake, and the rough-ridged, black-green sea of the fir-tops
began to unroll below him. At last he rounded an elbow of the steep,
and there before him, upthrust perhaps a hundred feet above his head,
stood the outlying shoulder of rock, crowned with its dead pine, on
which he was accustomed to see the eagle sitting. Even as he looked,
motionless, there came a rushing of great wings; and suddenly there
was the eagle himself, erect on his high perch, and staring, as it
seemed to Horner, straight into the sun.

When Horner resumed his climbing, the great bird turned his head and
gazed down upon him with an ironic fixity which betrayed neither dread
nor wonder. Concluding that the nest would be lying somewhere