side on a limb near the nest, and he waited in concealment until in about thirty minutes they circled upward and headed out to sea. Then he went energetically to work.
To Jen the climb up the pine trunk was a small matter. It was his boast—not altogether a vain one—that he could follow wherever a ring-tailed coon might lead. With a length of stout rope passed around his waist and around the trunk of the tree, he went up slowly but steadily, stopping twice to rest, and in less than ten minutes he gained the first of the pine's few limbs. Directly below the great bulging nest there was some little delay; but presently, with the help of his rope, his long steelcorded arms drew his lean light body up on one of the large limbs forming the crotch in which the king's castle was built. Standing on this limb, to which his bare feet stuck like the clinging feet of a tree frog or a lizard, he peered eagerly over the rim of the nest.
The king's castle, his home for more than twenty-five years, was built mainly of sticks, some of them nearly as stout as Jen's wrist, bark, sods and gray Spanish moss. Each season the king and his mate had repaired it and added to it until now it was nearly six feet in height, and the marshman, standing tiptoe on the limb, could barely see its flat interior, lined with moss, sedge, pine straw, leaves and
