II
The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost imperceptibly. Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings—the wings of fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed—"spoke" like swords through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven.
The night-folk began to move abroad. You could hear them pass—now a faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky, "Keck! keck!" and was gone.
It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move. None of the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far out over the marsh, unperceived. He was there—you must take my word for it—just two faintly luminous yellow-green lamps floating on the mist.
Not many men knew their way across the marsh by day; certainly not five even of the oldest wildfowlers could have got over safely by night. It was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into the short, salt grass, so closely that there was nothing of him left. Something else was coming his way.
Along the edge of the dike it came—tall, thin, pale, ghostly, and—yes, I could have sworn it, though night does play odd tricks with the human eyesight—faintly phosphorescent. At least, it seemed to glow ever so dimly, like one that moves in a nearly burnt-out halo.
Every yard or two it paused, that thing. Once there was a splash, as if some one were spearing fish and had missed.
The cat moved rather less than an average stone. He knew that in the wild to be motionless is, in nine cases out of ten, to be invisible. The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that discovers it usually dies. Moreover, there was no cover to move to, and cover is the cat's trump card.
Now, everything would have gone off all right if—well, if the cat hadn't been a cat, I suppose; that is, if he had been able to stop the ceaseless twitching of the black tip of his tail. Tiger-hunters know that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of it, as also the sparrow on the garden wall, whose life may have been saved from somebody's pet "tabby" by that same twitching. It is a characteristic habit of the tribe, I take it.
The luminous ghost-thing was close now. Heaven knows whether it saw that twitching then! I think so. It stopped, anyway, and became a pillar of stone. The cat, almost under it, fairly pressed himself into the grass.
Then—whrrp!
Something shot through the air like a lance, and pinned that twitching tail-point to the ground. There had been no warning—nothing! Just that javelin from the ghost, and—-the cat on his hindlegs, screaming like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very big, long-legged bird which flapped. It flapped huge wings and danced a grotesque dance, and it smelt abominably, with the stench of ten fish-markets on a hot day.
Then at last, the cat clawing and yelling the whole time, the bird's slow brain seemed to realize the mistake. The javelin, which was its beak, was withdrawn from the protesting tail-tip hurriedly—to be driven through the cat's skull as a sheer act of necessary self-defense, I fancy. But the cat did not wait to see. Imagine the infamy, the absolute sacrilege, from a cat's point of view, of spitting a feline tail in that disgusting fashion. Why, if you only tread on one, you hear about it in five-tenths of the average second, and offend the supercilious owner for a month afterwards!
There was a vision, just a half-guessed vision, of our cat shooting straight upwards through the air, and outwards over the still waters of the dike; there was a number one splash that set the reflected stars dancing, and the water-voles ("rats," if you like) bolting to their holes; and there was the sighing "frou-frou-frou!" of great wings as the big bird rose and fled majestically. There was the sucking gurgle and drip-drip of a furred body leaving the water on the far side, eyes that glared more hate than pen can set down, and a deep, low, malignant feline curse. That cat had swum the rest of the way over the dike which he could not jump.
The bird was only a heron, and that does not sound much unless you are acquainted with the ways of the heron and all his beak implies. A heron is one of those birds that can fight at need, and—knows it. Moreover, in his long beak, set on his steel-spring neck, he has a weapon of awful "piercefulness," and—knows that too. The bird is an example of armed defense.
This one had merely been fishing for eels in that pessimistic way peculiar to all fishermen, and seeing the tail-tip waving in the grass, and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry. And this will be the easier to believe because we know, and probably the heron did also, that eels are given at times to overland journeys on secret errands of their own.
The cat crawled away down the dike in offended silence. He was wet, and the only cat I ever knew who did not seem to be scandalized past speech at the fact. Indeed, he went farther. He came upon a ripple and a dot, some fifty yards farther on, which to the initiated such as he, represented a water-vole ("rat," if you will) swimming.
Then, before you could take your pipe from your mouth to exclaim, the water-vole was not swimming. He was squealing in a most loud and public-spirited fashion from between Pharaoh's jaws, and it was the cat who was swimming. He had just taken a flying leap from the bank and landed full upon the dumbfounded water-vole—splash! Then he swam calmly ashore and dined, all wet and cold. Now, what is one to say of such a cat?
