Secondly, a white eider-down quilt—at least, that was what it seemed like—descended lightly as—as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up. You could hear his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you could see the quilt—but they saw that it looked pale brown on top—lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat underneath. Then the quilt got him—you could hear the unspeakably beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly—and then the quilt rose, still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a rat—a brown rat—twitching in its white-mittened claws.
But do you think that made any difference? If so, you don't know the cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.
As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt—he could not stop—clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague—other rats usually answer it—coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and was after them.
The barn was an unfortunate choice. It seemed full of brown rats, and four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now fairly hunted black couple. Nothing but their miraculous agility saved those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend behind them.
Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a towering building of wood, and along this—here they lost six inches of the precious twelve by which they led—looking for a hole. They found it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard behind the five.
They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it. But the end seemed positive, anyway. It was only a question of tiring the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks—one of those rats a dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches—joined in the mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position that there was no escape—no escape for any but a black rat. For them there was one way. And those two living electric sparks on four feet took it. They went up the wall!
I don't know, but I guess that, as the black rats' upper jaws were longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats', and their tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail—and legs, too—and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that possessed by the brown ghouls. Be that as it may, they did it, and got a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies, traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.
Then the two, cornered at last, with one last desperate rush, shot up through a hole in the boards, out into the middle of the room on the first floor, and stopped dead.
Ah! they stopped. Good reason, too. Good reason had the five brown rats, excited with blood-lust, hard on their tails, to stop also.
They found themselves suddenly revealed in the middle of a big room, furnished mainly with a few sacks, and flooded with a dazzling, blinding glare of electric light, that seemed brighter than the very sun.