“But that is strange! I tell you she was in the room here when you came in this morning. I had just given her a piece of bacon.”
I looked away from him. It was not good to watch his eyes when he was lying. It seemed to me that I saw something in them black and naked jibbering at me like a satyr.
“What made her cry out last night—in your hut?—”
“Last night?—in my hut? She didn’t stay with me, you know. The little brute was so ill-tempered and vixenish, and so determined not to stay, that I opened the door and threw her out about half an hour after I left you.”
“Into the storm?”
“Oh, the storm! Pooh! cats know how to look after themselves. She evidently did, for she was as lively as a cricket in here this morning. What are you worrying about, my dear girl? She’ll come sidling in when it pleases her. She’s gone off on a hunting trip like Ringe. All the cats in this country are more than half wild.”
I got up and left the table, my heart like a stone: not only for my little snowbally cat with her winning ways, but for myself. At that moment I terribly hated life.
“I’m going to ride out and see if Ringe got that lion,” he called after me. “Will you come?”
“No!”
I had planned to go ferning that afternoon to a creek near by. The ground of my grotto was all prepared for the new plants, but I could not bring myself to start. I kept wandering up the kopje side, and among the zinias. At last, as I came to the huts again, I heard the boys wrangling outside the kitchen.