There they were, all seven, black and brown, struck rigid, plain and clear for any to see. And four men and two dogs stood there seeing them. They, those men and dogs, had just come quietly for their evening rat-hunt, turning on the light suddenly, for the place was a mill as well as a farm, making—from the mill-wheel—its own electricity.
There was a strained, aching pause for about as long as a man takes to gasp. Then the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.
But the black rats! The brown rats died, at intervals, fighting horribly, as cornered brown rats do. In five minutes they were, all five, dead—that is, all that had come into the room and been cut off. The black rats, however, in five minutes, were not dead. Nobody seems to have seen them, after the hunt had once begun, till the others were killed. Even then all four men aver that they could never rightly swear that they saw them. They saw lines, and streaks, and flashes, and whirls, and halos of black, which might have been rats—and the dogs said they were—but no one could swear to it. At times these giddy phenomena were among the rafters, at other times they were on the floor, and yet again they were going up or coming down the walls; but all the while both men and dogs seemed to be everlastingly too late, and hunting them where, half-a-second before, they had been. In fact, they perpetually had been, and were always where snapping jaws and beating sticks were not.
At the end of half-an-hour the men, mopping their foreheads, even in that cold, gasped, "Lor' love yer! Did yer ever see th' like?"
At the end of three-quarters of an hour the men flung themselves, gasping, on to the sacks of flour, and the dogs, panting, on to the floor—done. And the black rat and his mate, lively as ever, perkily watched them from the rafters.
Then the men and dogs went away, the light went out, and presently great sounds of war below suggested that the brown rats on the ground-floor were having the time of their lives. So were the two black rats, but a different sort of time. They were feasting upon meal and grain. And there, so far as I know, as they were like birds, flying among the rafters like black lightning if molested, they live to this day.
IX
LAWLESS LITTLE LOVE
She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a pleased cat's—but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure—that shone ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes shone red.