Adventure, January 20, 1922 — page 121: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Emperor of the Dragons way. In an insect world of magic flight his flight was the most wonderful of all, I think. It was just one of those things that created him emperor. , The emperor fed them, as almost always, with the furious haste of a famished beast, his jaws working like reaper knives, so rapidly that in a few seconds there was nothing except a few shavings of hard skin left upon the leaf to show that the blue- bottle had ever lived at all. For a few minutes after the.emperor sat still, cleaning his face vigorously, cat fashion, except that he spun it round at will, as if on a pivot, in a most uncanny and disconcert- ing way rather peculiar to dragon-flies. Then he was up and away above the dazzling waters of the pond, and slowly flew the length of it, with a strange, almost mechanical tenseness, and, as it were, leashed reserve of power that made his flight all his own. Now he went astern with unexpected swiftness. Now he hung poised, a quivering focus of rain-bow gleams. Now he whizzed ahead in the wake of a small golden-bronze wasp, that saved itself only by a headlong dive into a brier-bush, whose exquisite pink flowers hung like swung censers in the shade. Now once more he was a thin, tenuous . line, drawn aloft from pond to sky, defying the eye to follow. Again he was a silver dart, fired from the heavens, and not shat- tered to a hundred pieces upon the ground only by some miracle; and then, as he again hurtled horizontally ahead, one saw that he was in pursuit of a metallic green-bronze green-bottle fly, and even in the same in- stant his bristle-spined, steel-trap forelegs shot out—much as he was wont to shoot out his long underlip in that other life—and that “bottle” went with him, “pinging” aloud, but fast held, to agreyish bog myrtle leaf, whereon he fed. Much fuel, it seemed, was needed to stoke the emperor up to the almost bursting high pressure of fine-drawn speed and energy; but once he was on the wing, he became the acme of speed incarnate, just as, once settled, he was the embodiment of repose. But this time the emperor didnot get time to wash his face and hands, as I think he always liked to do after a meal, being of.cleanly habits that would shame even acat. Something had taken fire in the sun- shine, and streaked across the pond. The emperor, whose great eyes seemed to 119 miss nothing that moved or breathed—saw it, and darted in its wake like a finely-drawn silver wire. ie other was actually another dragon- fly, and then the battle of wing science commenced. . The rival emperor shifted about that scene like reflections from a hand-mirror in the sun flashed on a wall. Only for brief fractions of a second, and at intervals, .was it possible to see them, and to note that the emperor was always in the same place, and so close behind his foe that the two seemed to be a single piece of mechanism. Both knew that no kingdom is large enough to hold two emperors. Both knew, too, that the invader had broken avery rigid law among dragon-flies in trespassing upon the emperor’s beat, a law which, except in pursuit of prey—which_recog- nizes no frontiers—is not made to be lightly broken. Perhaps that was why the invader, who was, of course, a male, never turned during that forked-lightning chase, to do battle, never seemed able to shake off the consciousness of guilt. He darted with the speed of light, and on the angles of Euclid, up, down, to port, to starboard, ahead, but never astern—for there, as if towed, and a bare inch behind, reached the steel-trap forelegs of the ex- pressionless, deadly emperor—till he was, eventually, hunted off the premises. Then it was, at last, that the emperor turned and glided back slowly, white against the somber green of the oaks, as an aero- plane “caught”? by a search-light. He showed plainly, flashing like a rapier-point, making passes at the gnats and midges as he came. One beheld him alight to devour one of the latter, foilmg his magnificence against a pure star of marguerite; and one realized, too, that in that act he had struck his hour of fate. If he had not settled there the hen- sparrow would not*have turned flycatcher, and trapezed down with more rapidity than One had just time to see that the ‘one would have given her credit for, from the rustling birch-tree above. She hit the flower but not the emperor. He seemed to have moved himself from that spot to another a dozen feet away in the very in- stant that her beak struck. The sparrow returned, fluttering, to her tree, but a bold, bad thrush, skimming: CORICLOO S (C@