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Buttoning his jacket as he went, he made his way across by a short cut to the hangars and found Blackie surrounded by half a dozen officers already on the spot. "Is that you, Tam? I want you to go up there she goes!" They listened. "Whoom!" "Fritz has sneaked across in the dark and is industriously bombing billets," he said; "he dodged the Creeper's Patrol. Go and see if you can find him."
"I used to think so too," said Rap; "but now I see a difference. The body and bill of the Nuthatch is stouter, and not such a pretty shape, and his bill almost turns up. This Warbler is thinner, with a slender bill that curves a little down, like the Brown Creeper's. Then too, he has smaller and finer stripes than any Woodpecker." "What guild does he belong to?" asked Dodo.
"The canary creeper's got in among the pine trees now," said the man with the lorgnette. "It wasn't there this morning. You can see it grow while you watch it." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his object-glasses with careful deliberation. "I reckon you're going down there," ventured Skelmersdale. "Will you come?" said Cossar. Skelmersdale seemed to hesitate. "It's an all-night job."
Insects are not hard for any bird to eat, and so the bills of these birds do not have to be very stout or thick some, indeed, are very thin and weak, like the Brown Creeper's. "But the habits of the Finch family are quite different, and their beaks also.
But you are not a bit that way. Then the way you run up tree trunks and along the limbs isn't a bit Warbler-like. Why don't you flit and dart about as the others do?" Creeper's bright eyes sparkled. "I don't have to," said he. "I'm going to let you into a little secret, Peter. The rest of them get their living from the leaves and twigs and in the air, but I've discovered an easier way.
A bird who thinks nothing of staying by his nest and his mate at the sacrifice of his life is not to be written down a dullard or a drudge, merely because his dress is plain and his occupation unromantic. He has a right to sing, for he has something within him to inspire the strain. There are descriptions of the creeper's music which liken it to a wren's.
He knew the creeper's goal: that black streak in the wall above, rendered thin by foreshortening. He knew the creeper! Twenty or thirty paces short of the ladder he stopped. From that spot he hurled his first rock. His was a young, powerful arm and the missile sped upward as if shot from a catapult.
Not far from this spot, on a previous occasion, I had very unexpectedly come face to face with another of the creeper's blood-thirsty persecutors. But to catch sight of a small bird amid thick foliage, fifty feet or more above you, is not an easy matter, as I believe I have already once remarked.
His tongue did not falter over the loved, forbidden name he spoke it quite naturally and conversationally, as if glad that he could introduce it at last into their business. Joanna's body stiffened, but he did not see it, for he was gazing at the young creeper's budding trail over the door.
His song is similar to that of the Summer Yellow-Bird, so common in our gardens among the fruit-trees, but it is more shrill and feeble. The Creeper's song does not differ from it more than the songs of different individuals of the same species may differ.
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