I don't know how he went. He just seemed to fade out in the frame of the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a dissolving picture.
A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.
Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new flood of light, and—silence. Only the one or two late flies "pinged," while the little clock fairly raced.
The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.
He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in. He had come to find "that there pesky cat." And in this, perhaps, he showed more sense than most people gave him credit for. Apparently, he had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary cat—and cats of any kind are bad enough—and certainly he guessed that the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse, calamity.
The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep. No cat there. His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this search. Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished—had, in fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.
Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the holly-hedge through which he was sliding. He growled under the punishment. Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such cases, though they may "swear."
Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other side, turned to his right, and galloped up it. It ran upwards, skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth. They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.
The cat's gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, long, his head low, his forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind. So does the tiger gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.
There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had him on the move and could see. He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with "faint pale stripes" well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and "whippy," ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh, quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.