Captain Kyd: The Wizard of the Sea. J. H. Ingraham

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СКАЧАТЬ of rock, removing his foot at the same instant to make room for it, and stood upright and with confidence on the limb.

      Satisfied that the branch, which, turned back by the cliff, had forced the tree to lean over the water, would safely sustain him, he now glanced down to the foot of the tree, and began to inspect the hold of the trunk upon the shelf from which it grew. The examination afforded him no very great assurance; nevertheless, he determined to test its strength by advancing out on the limb, though aware that, if it should yield to his weight, he would be hurled with it into the sea. Even this reflection did not present any weighty objection to his making the trial; for with a fearless recklessness, for which there is no sufficient term in language, he half anticipated the possibility of such a catastrophe, and caught himself calculating the chances in favour of his taking in safety a flight into the deep pool beneath. Letting go his grasp on the point of rock, he now settled himself astride the branch, and made gradual approaches towards the trunk. It remained firm as the rock in which it was imbedded, and scarcely gave signs of feeling his weight till he touched the body, when the top slightly vibrated. He paused; but, finding it still remain fast, rose to his feet and clasped the scathed trunk, at first lightly, and then more firmly; and at last, gaining confidence, he shook it till the hawk fluttered anew in its perch. Assured of its security, his lips unclosed, and his eyes lost their severity, and with a smile of success he cast them triumphantly upward, where, but a few feet above him, entangled by the long shaft of the arrow and his broken wing, he saw the falcon secured in the crotch formed by a fork of three stumps of limbs (all that decay had left) that terminated its summit.

      Without hesitation he began to climb the trunk, which, save the limb by which he had reached it, and the branches crowning it, was bare from its roots upward. This was the least difficult part of his hazardous enterprise, and he soon got within reach of the bird, and stretched one arm forth to seize him by the wing. But the fierce animal, who had for a few moments ceased his struggles to watch, with a quick and guarded glance, the movements of the young fisherman, no sooner saw this hostile demonstration on the part of his human foe, than, with an intelligence supernaturally called forth by existing suffering and anticipated danger, he struck at him fiercely with his sharp, glittering talons; while, stretching downward his head to the full extent of his neck, he uttered long, wild cries of mingled fear and menace. Nothing daunted by what, in itself, was sufficiently appalling, the young man coolly watched his opportunity, and, at the expense of several severe wounds in the wrist from his talons, caught the hawk by the throat. Clinging round a limb with the disengaged arm, he raised himself higher in the tree, and lifting his prize, which still struck at him with his armed feet, he skilfully extricated the wing and arrow from the crotch: the next instant, with the huge, fluttering bird in his hand, he had slidden down the trunk, and was standing on the transverse limb with a flushed brow, and a triumphant look illuminating his handsome and fearless countenance.

      With one arm bent around the tree, and the other holding the hawk at full length, he now began to cast his eyes upward. They travelled over the bare surface, scarcely without lighting upon a resting-place for a squirrel; and he began, for the first time, to question the possibility of reascending; it having been comparatively easy for him to let his body down by the crevice, as he had descended, while it would be impracticable for him to lift its whole weight up again by the mere effort of the fingers. A glance demonstrated this to him at once. But time was not given him to reflect on a plan for surmounting a difficulty which, in reality, was insurmountable, his faculties being at once called into action to save himself from being thrown from this dizzy perch by the struggles of the hawk. This ferocious creature had been wounded by the arrow in the side just beneath the wing, which was broken by the fall to the earth, and, thence passing upward, the barb had come out through his back, without touching any vital part. His strength was, therefore, through pain, rather augmented than diminished; and notwithstanding the manual pressure upon his windpipe, he now began to battle fiercely with his captor, fighting both with his claws and remaining wing. Though holding him out at arm's length, the young man was unable wholly to defend himself from the strong blows of the wing, which was three feet in length, with which he violently assailed him about the head, while with his talons he succeeded in striking his person and inflicting a deep wound in his breast. He for a time coolly bore the heavy sweeps of the wing, hoping he would soon tire; but he forgot that his terrible antagonist was "the bird of tireless wing;" and, at length, finding his own strength beginning to fail, though his spirit was unsubdued, he loosened his hold from the trunk of the tree which his arm had hitherto encircled, and, leaning his back against it, watched his opportunity, and suddenly, with a firm grasp, seized the wing as it was beating against his temples, and, by a sudden and skilful turn of his wrist, dislocated it. This bold act nearly destroyed his equilibrium; and, after its successful accomplishment, he just had time to recover his hold on the tree to save himself from falling into the dark wave below. For a moment afterward his heart throbbed tumultuously; and reflecting on the imminent peril he had incurred by this necessary exposure, he trembled with emotion and several times breathed heavily, as if to relieve his breast of a weight of suffocating sensations—the tribute which nature demanded of humanity.

      Goaded to increased rage by the additional pain, and maddened at his vain efforts to lift his useless wing, the eyes of the hawk glittered in his head like a snake's, and, opening his red jaws, he thrust forth his long, narrow tongue, and hissed at his captor like an angry serpent. It was a moment that called for all the moral energy and physical nerve man is capable of exercising in the hour of danger. The extraordinary young fisherman evinced the possession of these qualities in a degree adequate to the crisis which called them into action. With his eyes fixed unflinchingly on the burning eyeballs of the hawk, and calmly indifferent the while to the terrible hisses which came hot from his throat and fell warm upon his face, he continued to keep him at bay so that his talons should not reach his person, and put forth all his strength to strangle him. There was a moral grandeur in the spectacle this young fisher's lad presented, fearlessly perched on his fearful eminence, as regardless of the depth below as if standing in his own cottage door, battling at such odds with the fiercest warrior of the air!

      It was at this crisis that one of the fishermen, a very old man, whose attention, with that of his companions, had been hitherto too much occupied by the trial at archery to give a thought to the youth, after having remained to see the prize awarded to the victress, turned to leave the ground, when missing the young man, he recollected that he had seen him follow the hawk to the verge of the cliff. Calling him by name and not receiving any reply, he approached the precipice; but finding that he was on the most perpendicular part of it, he cast only a hasty glance down, and was about to turn away, supposing he had, unseen, descended to the beach by the usual route a little farther to the north, when a movement far below arrested his eyes. Looking steadily, he beheld the youth with one arm clasped round the tree, and the other stretched out, holding the bird by the neck, while all his moral and physical energies were called into action to enable him to defend himself against the talons of the savage creature.

      A glance conveyed to the fisherman the whole extent of the danger; and, after looking down upon him for a moment in speechless horror, his limbs trembled with fear, and, giving utterance to a wild cry, he would have fallen from the precipice had he not caught by a tree that hung over its verge. Kate Bellamont was the first to reach the cliff on hearing the alarm given by the old man; and, glancing down, she intuitively comprehended the peril in which the youth had placed himself. With wonderful presence of mind, waving her hand back to those advancing, she said with energy,

      "Hold! all of ye! Breathe not a word! He is in mortal danger! A shriek, or a sign of fear among us may unnerve his bold spirit and be fatal to him!"

      Several of the young archeresses stopped suddenly, and turned pale at this intimation of danger; while one or two, with more sensibility of nerves, unable to control their fears, turned and fled towards the castle, as if in the retirement of their closets they would shut out all sense of the threatened evil. Young Lord Robert was the first by Kate Bellamont's side.

      "By Heaven! a bold peasant!" he said, his eyes sparkling with admiration; "but—"

      "Lester, this СКАЧАТЬ