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!