A Veldt Official: A Novel of Circumstance. Mitford Bertram

Around, beneath, free and vast, spread the rolling panorama of mountain and plain.

      “Ah! this is to live indeed!” broke from Mona. “I don’t know that I ever enjoyed a day so much in my life.”

      The other did not immediately look at her, but when he presently did steal a keen, but furtive glance at her face, there was something there, which, combined with the tone wherein she had uttered the above words, set him thinking.

      “I don’t see anything of the dasje-vanger,” he said, at length; “and yet this is about the place where it should have fallen. It may have fluttered into the long grass, but couldn’t have gone far with that bullet hole through it. Now, you search that way, and I’ll search this.”

      For a few minutes they searched hither and thither; then a cry from Mona brought him to her side.

      “This is the place,” she said. “Look!”

      She stood as near as she dared to the brow of the cliff, pointing downwards. On the very verge, fluttering among the grass bents, were several small feathers, jet black, and such as might have come out of the breast of the great bird. Roden advanced to the brink.

      “This is the place!” he declared, leaning over. “And, look! there lies our quarry, stone dead. The spiteful brute has chosen a difficult place, if not an inaccessible one.”

      “Where? Let me see. Hold my hand, while I look down, for I don’t half like it.”

      This he did, and shudderingly she peered over. From where they stood the cliff fell for about twenty feet obliquely, but very steep, and grown over with tufts of grass, to a narrow ledge scarcely two feet wide; below this – space. But upon this ledge lay the great eagle, with outstretched wings, stone dead, its head hanging over the abyss.

      “I can get at it there, fortunately,” muttered Roden.

      “What are you going to do?”

      “I’m going down to pick up the bird.”

      “You are not.”

      He stared.

      “But I want it,” he urged. “It is too fine a specimen to be left lying there.”

      “Never mind; you can shoot another. Now, don’t go, don’t!”

      Again he recognised the expression which came into her face, as with startled eyes and voice which shook with the very abandon of her entreaty, she stood there before him. What then? He had seen that look in other faces, but what had come of it!

      “I am going down,” he repeated.

      “You cannot; you shall not. It is too horrible. You will be killed before my eyes. Won’t you give it up because I ask you?”

      “No.”

      There were men who would have given a great deal to have heard Mona Ridsdale speak to them in that tone, who would willingly have risked their lives, rather than have refrained from risking them, at her request. This one, however, answered short and straight and with brutal indifference, “No.”

      They looked at each other for a moment, as though both realised that this was a strange subject for a conflict of will, then she said,

      “So you will not give it up?”

      “No. It is an easy undertaking, and for me a safe one.”

      She turned away without another word, and he began his descent.

      This, however, was less simple than it looked, as is usually the case, or rather, so appallingly simple that a slight slip, or the loosening of a grass tussock, would send the average climber whirling into space. But Roden Musgrave was an experienced hand on mountains, and thoroughly understood the principle of distributing his weight. In a very short space of time he was standing on the ledge, and had picked up the dead bird.