IV.
By two o'clock the results of Mr. Marrapit's colossal scheme began to pour in.
The bowls of milk, gleaming along the wall of Herons' Holt, drew every stray cat within a radius of two miles. Beneath, each armed with a clothes-prop, toiled Mr. Fletcher and Frederick under the immediate generalship of Mr. Marrapit.
Throughout the morning cats bounded, flickered and disappeared upon the wall. Fat cats, thin cats; tom cats, tabby cats; white cats, black cats, yellow cats, and grey cats; young cats and old cats. As each appeared, Mr. Marrapit, first expectant then moaning, would wave his assistants to the assault. Up would go the clothes-prop of Mr. Fletcher or Frederick; down would go the stranger cat. It was exhausting work.
At two-thirty the village boys who had been searching were mustered at the gate. Each bore a cat. Some carried two. Leaving his clothes-prop lancers, Mr. Marrapit hurried down the drive to hold review.
“Pass,” he commanded, “in single file before me.”
They passed. “Dolt! Dolt!” groaned Mr. Marrapit, writhing in the bitterness of crushed hope as each cat was held towards him. “Dolt and pumpkin-head! How could that wretched creature be my Rose?”
How, indeed, when at that moment the Rose of Sharon in the ruined hut was lapping milk taken her by George in a lemonade bottle, her infamous captor smoking on the threshold?
Precisely at three o'clock Mr. David Brunger arrived. Conducted to the room whence the Rose had disappeared, the astute inquiry agent was there closeted with Mr. Marrapit for half an hour. At the end of that time Mr. Marrapit appeared on the lawn. His face was white, his voice, when he spoke, hollow and trembling. He called to the clothes-prop lancers:
“Cease. Cease. Withdraw the milk. The Rose of Sharon is not strayed. She is stolen!”
“Thenk Gord!” said Frederick. “Thenk Gord! I've pretty well busted myself over this game.”
Mr. Fletcher said nothing; drew his snail from his pocket; plunged head downwards in a bush. Woe sat heavy upon him; beneath the indignity and labour of thrusting at stranger cats with a clothes-prop this man had grievously suffered.