“He is not wise to do that,” commented Miss Miranda. “When he caws so loudly he is apt to bring the wild crows and they do not like him.”
Friendly as Dick was with all members of the human race, he was plainly not on good terms with his own kind. Luxurious living had made him larger and sleeker than they, but a less agile flier. He led a lazy life and was not so practiced or swift on the wing as those hard, wiry birds who gained their living by gleaning in the fields. Even as Betsey watched, a rusty, wild crow flew up, attracted by his cawing, and perched on the wall beside him, followed by another and another.
“Oh, look,” Betsey cried, “they are pecking him. And here come some others!”
The wild crows had fallen on poor Dick with vicious, stabbing bills and were being joined by a rapidly increasing crowd of comrades. The clamor that arose was deafening, Dick’s pathetic caws being mixed with the angry, harsh cries of his assailants, all of whom were jealous, it seemed, of his plump sides and shining coat. He took flight finally and sailed away toward the top of the hill, pursued by a trailing cloud of chattering enemies.
“The wild crows have always hated him,” Miss Miranda said anxiously, “and he will never learn not to provoke them. There are so many this time that I am afraid they will peck him to death.”
Elizabeth set off in pursuit, hoping to find where they had alighted and to drive off the attacking birds, but, although she ran with all speed across the lawn and through the gate in the wall, she lost sight of the flock over the crest of the hill. The continued uproar, however, of angry crow voices guided her onward so that she followed farther and farther, hoping every moment to come close enough to scatter the struggling group with a stone. She found traces of the battle here and there, in scattered black feathers that drifted over the grass. She would not give up the chase so long as poor Dick, driven ever farther from home, still called for help from his human friends with a voice that grew continually weaker.
Past the ruined house she ran, and down the farther slope of the hill, through unexplored country where thick hedges and overgrown flower beds showed the traces of an abandoned formal garden. There was a sundial, so covered with vines that no one, even at high noon, could have read the hour on its mossy face, and a tumbledown arbor smothered in climbing yellow roses. More and more she realized what a beautiful place this must have been where Miss Miranda had once lived, but Dick’s unhappy progress gave her little time for observation.
Over the lower wall swept the chase and over the wall went Betsey in pursuit, clambering up one side by the aid of a leaning pear tree and half sliding, half tumbling down on the other. She reached the ground with rather of a thud, but she picked herself up and ran on, paying no attention to the jarring fall. The way went across plowed fields now, and through bramble hedges, past a stream or two and even into a swampy meadow where the green sod sank under Elizabeth’s footsteps and left muddy pools that sucked at her shoes. Finally a farmer’s cottage at the edge of a river came in sight and, to her relief here, the running fight seemed to have come to an end. She saw the wild crows perching and rocking on the boughs of a big tree before the gate, cawing in such shrill-voiced anger that she was certain they must have been somehow robbed of their prey. As she came panting into the farmyard she observed there was a pigeonhouse high up under the peak of the barn roof and it was plain, from the way in which the astonished white birds were bursting out of doors and windows, that it was in their dwelling that the harassed and desperate Dick had taken refuge.
A surprised farmer, not knowing quite what to make of such a breathless and disheveled stranger, led her up the narrow stairs that climbed to the pigeon loft and opened the door upon the rows of perches and nests. Dick came fluttering to her at once, a weary and bedraggled bird, with his bright plumage torn and his head bleeding and plucked almost bare. She held him carefully as she picked her way down the steep stairs again, unable to help laughing at his croaking attempts to tell just what had happened.
The farmer’s wife, a hearty, friendly woman, insisted that Elizabeth sit down in the shade of the big tree and rest a little.