stiletto-points of the owl’s talons sank through the cloth into his neck, his jaws closed on one of the huge bird’s legs.  His teeth sank deep, there was a snapping and grinding of tendon and bone, and a hissing squawk of pain and fear came from above him as the owl made a mighty effort to launch himself free.  As the five-foot pinions beat the air Peter was lifted from the ground.  But the owl’s talons were hopelessly entangled in the cloth, and the two fell in a heap again.  Peter scarcely sensed what happened after that, except that he was struggling against death.  He closed his eyes, and the leg between his jaws was broken and twisted into pulp.  The wings beat about him in a deafening thunder, and the owl’s beak tore at his flesh, until the pool of moonlight in which they fought was red with blood.  At last something gave way.  There was a ghastly cry that was like the cry of neither bird nor beast, a weak flutter of wings, and Gargantua of the Air staggered up into the treetops and fell with a crash among the thick boughs of the spruce.

Peter raised himself weakly, the severed leg of the owl dropping from his jaws.  He was half blinded.  Every muscle in his body seemed to be torn and bleeding, yet in his discomfort the thrilling conviction came to him that he had won.  He tensed himself for another attack, hugging the ground closely as he watched and waited, but no attack came.  He could hear the flutter and wheeze of his maimed adversary, and slowly he drew himself back—­still facing the scene of battle—­until in a farther patch of gloom he turned once more to his business of following the trail of Jolly Roger McKay.

There was no mark of bravado in his advance now.  If he had possessed an over-growing confidence, Gargantua’s attack had set it back, and he stole like a shifty fox through the night.  Driven into his brain was the knowledge that all things were not afraid of him, for even the snapping beaks and floating gray shapes to which he had paid but little attention had now become a deadly menace.  His egoism had suffered a jolt, a healthful reaction from its too swift ascendency.  He sensed the narrowness of his escape without the mental action of reasoning it out, and his injuries were secondary to the oppressive horror of the uncanny combat out of which he had come alive.  Yet this horror was not a fear.  Heretofore he had recognized the ghostly owl-shapes of night more or less as a curious part of darkness, inspiring neither like nor dislike in him.  Now he hated them, and ever after his fangs gleamed white when one of them floated over his head.

He was badly hurt.  There were ragged tears in his flank and back, and a last stroke of Gargantua’s talons had stabbed his shoulder to the bone.  Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was closing, so that shapes and shadows were grotesquely dim in the night.  Instinct and caution, and the burning pains in his body, urged him to lie down in a thicket and wait for the day.  But stronger than these were memory of the girl’s urging voice, the vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and the freshness of Jolly Roger’s trail as it kept straight on through the forest’s moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom.