CHAPTER X 
“THE LAST AMERICAN”’ 
E clasped the crag with crooked hands, but 
he was not close to the sun in distant lands; 
he was eight hundred feet up on a ledge over- 
looking the wild gorge of the Deerfield River, 
where it breaks out of the Green Mountains, hits 
a buttress of the Berkshires, and turns east to cut 
its way to the Connecticut. ‘To be exact, he was 
not even clasping the crag, but the storm-twisted 
stem of a low pitch pine which grew on the crag. 
As he sat there, intent and still, the brown river 
rippling over its shallow, stony bottom like a thin 
ribbon far below him, the juts of naked rock 
around him, across the gorge the precipitous op- 
posite wall and then the fold on fold of wild, | 
tumbled, forest-clad hills, he made a picture 
peculiarly fitted to its rugged setting. He stood 
almost three feet high, his feathers a glossy black- 
ish brown where the sunlight glinted on wing 
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