"He came home to me with a wing broken one Sunday," said Jack. "It was heavy going, but he managed to get here. I thought at first we'd have some goose, but we didn't. The fact is, I was sort of proud that he came home in his trouble. I took the wing off, as you see. He's doing fine, but he tried to drink himself to death, as they all do. That appears to be the way they fix a broken wing. It may be the fever or the pain; anyway, they'll drink until they die. I kept this fellow dry, until he healed."
The splendid gamester stretched out his black head and hissed at me—something liquid and venomous in the sound—the long black beak as fine and polished as a case for a girl's penknife. He was game to the core and wild as ever.... Jack hadn't let him die—perhaps he felt out of the law because of that.
"I'll go and do my chores," Jack Miner said. "You can stay and think it out."
I knew from that how well he understood the same big thing out of the past which the wild bird meant to me. He had the excellent delicacy which comes from experience, to leave me there alone.
An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself clean—its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining to lay itself against the earth, like a billiard-ball in a stocking full of feathers.
And before me was the Magnificent, one that had made his continental flights, fasting for them, as saints fast in aspiration—lean and long, powerful and fine in brain and beak and wing—an admirable adversary, an antagonist worthy of eagles, ready for death rather than for captivity.... All that Gibbon ever wrote stood between this game bird and its obscene relative dragging its liver about a barnyard—the rise and fall of the Roman, and every other human and natural, empire—the rise by toil and penury and aspiration, and the fall to earth again in the mocking ruins of plenty....
Good Jack Miner expressed the same, but in his own way, when he came back from the chores.