for their excitement; but suddenly, as he brushed past a grass clump, something crunched under his forefoot. He had stepped squarely into a willet's nest and had broken two of the buffy, brown-blotched eggs. He ate these ravenously, then broke the two other eggs in the nest and ate them also. Conscious for the first time of his hunger, he nosed about from grass clump to grass clump and found five other nests, each containing eggs, all of which he devoured. Then, suddenly aware of a thirst which exceeded even his hunger, he pushed on across the belt of loose sand between the beach and the jungle's edge.
Luck favored him in his quest. A hundred feet within the dense wall of cassena and myrtle fringing the woods, a chain of ponds and pools extended for a quarter of a mile lengthwise of the island, fed either by rains or by obscure springs hidden amid rank reeds and rushes. As Rusty splashed along the slime-covered margin of one of these pools toward a little cove where the water growths fell away, a great milk-white bird, half as tall as a tall man, startled him as it rose with labored wing beats not more than half a dozen feet in front of him. He drank and drank and drank; then irresistible weariness came over him again and, making his way to a dry spot close to a palmetto trunk, he lay down and slept for hours.
