“Yes, barking up trees where there's nothing at all—that's what we call telling lies; and old Laddie's started the evening well by telling one already.”
“Not he,” cried a shrill voice; and the youngest of the three farm-hands—a little bit of a fellow—stood pointing to a branch so low that everyone else had overlooked it.
“I see a little bit of a knot on the bough,” said Missy, “but blow me tight if I see anything else!”
“That's it,” cried John William. “That little knot is a native cat.”
Missy lowered her gun at once. “Oh, I didn't come out,” said she, “to shoot cats!”
“But they aren't cats at all,” Teesdale explained (while his men stood and laughed); “they're much more like little leopards, I assure you. We only call them cats because—because I'm bothered if I know why! It's not the name for them, as you'll say when you've shot this beggar. And you don't know the way they tear our fowls to pieces, Missy, or you wouldn't make so many bones about it; besides which, you won't get an easier shot all night.”
“Oh, if that's the kind of customer, I'm on to try,” said Missy. She raised her gun there and then, pressed it to her shoulder, and took aim at the black notch against the silver disc of the moon. The moonlight licked the barrels from sight to sight, getting into Missy's eyes, but there were barely a dozen feet between muzzle and mark. The report was quickly followed by a lifeless thud upon the ground; and when the smoke cleared, that notch was gone from the bough. Then one of the men struck a match to show Missy what she had done; and she had done it so effectually as to give herself a sensation which she concealed with difficulty. It was not pity; there was no pitying a spotted little horror with so sharp a snout and such devilish fangs: but whatever it was, that sensation kept Missy modest in her success, so that she refused the next shot point-blank. John William took it, with the only possible result.
“A bushy.” someone said, turning over the dead bush-tailed opossum with his foot It looked very big and soft and gray, lying dead in the moonlight. Missy found it in her heart to pity an opossum.
“Don't you skin them?” she asked at a respectful range. “Do you make no use of them after all?”
“It's so hard not to spoil them,” John William said as he slipped another cartridge into the breech. He would have shown her how this particular skin had been ruined by the shot, but Missy said she quite understood.