I followed her meekly, leading my bicycle, which, like Lalage’s frock, had suffered in its contest with the laurel. We passed through the stable yard and I stopped to put my bicycle into the coach house. An Irish terrier, Lalage’s property, barked at me furiously, thinking, I suppose, that I intended to steal Canon Beresford’s cart. Lalage chose to regard this as a ridiculous affectation on the part of the dog and shut him up in the stable as a punishment for folly. Then we climbed a stile, paddled round a large manure heap, crossed an ash pit, and came at last to a pigsty. There were no pigs in it, and it was, for a pigsty, very clean. Lalage opened the gate and we entered the small enclosure in which the pigs, if there had been pigs, would have taken food and exercise.
“You’ll have to stoop down now and crawl,” said Lalage. “You needn’t be afraid. The pigs were sold last week.”
I realized that I was being invited to enter the actual home, the private sleeping room, of the departed swine. The door of it had been newly painted. While I knelt in front of it I read a notice which stretched across it in large white letters, done, apparently, with chalk:
The Office of the Anti-cat
Editor: Miss Lalage Beresford, B. A.
Sub-Editor: Ditto. Ditto.
Underneath this inscription was a carefully executed drawing of a spear with a large, a disproportionately large, and vicious looking barb. A sort of banner depended from its shaft, with these words on it: “For Use on Cattersby. Revenge is sweet!” I looked round at Lalage, who was on her hands and knees behind me.
I intended asking for some explanation of the extraordinarily vindictive spirit displayed by the spear and the banner. Lalage forestalled my question and explained something else.
“I have the office here,” she said, “because it’s the only place where I can be quite sure she won’t follow me.”
This time I understood thoroughly what was said to me. Cattersby—that is to say, Miss Battersby—if she were the sort of person who mourned over torn frocks, and if, as Lalage suggested, she liked clothes, would be very unwilling to follow any one into the recesses of the pigsty. Even a bower in the upper branches of a tree would be less secure from her intrusion. We crawled in. Against the far wall of the chamber stood the trough from which the pigs, now no doubt deceased, used to eat.
“It was put there,” said Lalage, who seemed to know that I was thinking of the trough, “after they had done cleaning out the sty, so that it wouldn’t go rotten in the wet before we got some more young pigs.”
“Was that Miss Battersby’s idea?”