lower sank the king, fighting to the last. Then the clog caught in the billowy green top of the cassena thicket and the eagle pitched earthward. Grinning with quiet satisfaction, Jen, who had rushed out into the clearing to mark the spot where the great bird fell, set out to find him, picking up a light stick on his way to help him make a passage through the dense growth.
A hundred yards from the eagles' pine, in an open sunny spot just beyond the outer edge of the cassena thicket, a diamond rattlesnake lay at full length in the short grass. Nearly seven feet long from the point of his plated arrow-shaped head to the end of his fifteen-ringed rattle and fully eleven inches in girth, his greenish-yellow body marked with dark-brown rhomboidal blotches bordered with gold, the huge serpent was a superb specimen of his terrible race, at once gorgeously beautiful and indescribably hideous. Even more arrogantly than the king of the air ruled the spaces above the island jungle the giant rattler ruled the jungle itself. A monarch of uncertain temper, his mood depending mainly upon the state of his stomach, he had watched Jen with sluggish well-fed tolerance the day before as the marshman sat in his cassena ambush near the eagles' pine. Today, however, he was
