Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

“Whoa!” yelled the boy. You could hear him up and down the street.

He jumped over the back of the seat and threw something—a great box, as nearly as I could make out—into the road, and then, turning the wagon on two wheels, came careening back again, still beating the horse as he went past me, standing up and lashing it with the whip, cursing like a sailor, and vanishing in his own cloud.

All this to get back before it rained?

I looked down the street to where the box lay in the middle of the road, and then I saw that he had dropped it in front of my house. It was my box he had delivered, and his hurry had not been entirely because of the storm. I suppose I might expect to have all my packages dropped in the road by fleeing rogues too craven to go near the dwelling.

Vexed with him for being such a fool, knowing I could not leave my belongings there in the street through a hurricane that might develop into a three days’ storm, yet still having no one to help me, I ran up the path as the first drops came down on my head and, getting an old wheelbarrow out of the yard, hoisted the heavy thing into it and pushed it up to the door. It was a box of books, packed in my husband’s sketchy manner, with openings between the boards on top through which newspapers showed. Not the sort of covering to withstand a northwest storm! And it was very heavy. A bitter gust drove a flying handful of straw up the street and whirled it round and round in the yard till it caught in the tops of the pine-trees like a crow’s-nest. They bent and swayed and squeaked under the high wind. A sheet of solid rain swept across the bay like a curtain just as I succeeded in shoving the box of books over the threshold and shut the door behind me.

Something had come in with me. It eyed me from under the stove. There was the skinny cat that had bounded out of the house with our arrival and had never been seen since! Tired with my futile trip, overwrought with the approaching storm, angry over my struggles with the box, I leaped upon the creature as if it was the cause of all my troubles.

“Get out! You can’t stay here! I don’t want you! Scat!”

But the cat thought otherwise.

It leaped past my clutch, scampering through the kitchen and on into the study beyond. I followed fast. The room was half-dark with the storm that beat around it; the rain made a cannonade upon the roof and blinded the windows with a steady downpour. The whole house shook. The five pine-trees outside bent beneath the onslaught as if they would snap and crash down upon me. I knew that the old shingles must be leaking, but first of all I must get that cat, I must put that horrible beast out!

As if it knew my thoughts it jumped upon the mantel and raised its back at me. Its eyes were green in its small head and its tail waved high above it. It did not seem to be a cat at all, but the reincarnation of some sinister spirit, tantalizing and defiant, aloof, and at the same time inexorable. I was so excited that I picked up the poker and would have struck it dead. But it dodged and leaped away—into the coat-closet, and I after it. I made a lunge with the poker, missed the cat, and struck the latch of the forbidden door. It flew open. The cat sprang—and disappeared. I followed. As I found myself climbing steep steps hand over hand in a black hole, I had time to think, like a drowning man, that anyway I had the poker, and if it was the captain hiding up there, he must be an old man and I could knock him down. I did not want to be locked in the house in a hurricane with a black cat and God knows what. I wanted to find out.