Chapter Fourteen.
Cheap Lodgings and Cats.
Oliver Lane’s double gun gave forth two sharp clicks as his thumb pressed back the cocks, and then, raising it to his shoulder, he waited, with his eyes searching among the thick leaves of the fig-tree, and trying to penetrate the orchids which clustered where the trunk forked and sent forth a dozen or so of minor boughs.
But the snarling sound had ceased, and there was not the slightest rustle among the leaves to indicate the spot where the animal was hidden. But in imagination he could see some big, lithe, cat-like creature crouching there in the tree-fork, ready to spring, its head looking flattened with the ears drawn down, teeth gleaming in a fierce snarl, eyes flashing with green phosphorescent-like light, and sharp claws alternately protruded and withdrawn.
All this was pictured by his active brain, but there was nothing visible save a gleam here and there, where the light from a fire-fly shone faintly from some leaf.
A minute passed, all eager watchfulness, and at the slightest rustle indicating action on the part of the animal Lane would have drawn trigger. But all remained still, and the young man asked himself what he had better do.
There were other trees about, but not one which offered such a satisfactory lodging, so easy to reach.
“One oughtn’t to mind a cat on the premises,” he laughingly said to himself at last. “It would keep away nuisances, but this is too much of a cat, and wants to have all the bed to itself.”
He hesitated about firing into the tree to scare the beast, partly from the idea that it might irritate it into springing and taking him at a disadvantage, for as he stood there the light was behind him, so that he must be plain to his invisible enemy; then, in the smoke, he would be unable to make out his foe, and there would be no chance or time to take aim with the second barrel, and he knew what the result would be—the brute seizing him with teeth and claws, holding on fast while it tore him with its hind legs, as a cat does a rat.
“A miserable end at the beginning of one’s life,” thought Lane. “Discretion’s the better part of valour,” he muttered. “I’ll go back and find another tree.”