“Eight whats left?” queried Swickey, fixing two tearfully wondering eyes on his face.
“Eight lives, you know. Every cat has nine lives.”
Swickey took his word for it without question, possibly because “eight” and “nine” suggested the intricacies of arithmetic. Although little more than a healthy young animal herself, she had instinctively disliked and mistrusted most of the men who came to Lost Farm Camp. But this man was different. He seemed more like her father, in the way he looked at her, and yet he was quite unlike him too.
“That’s a big name for such a little cat,” said David. “Where did he get his name?”
Swickey pondered. “Pop says it’s his name, and I guess Pop knows. The ole cat she run wild in the woods and took Beelzebub ’long with her ’fore he growed up, and Pop ketched him, and he bit Pop’s thumb, and then Pop said thet was his name. He ketched him fur me.”
Just then Avery came in with a pail of water and Swickey set about clearing the table. David, a bit shaken despite his apparently easy manner, strolled out into the sunshine and down the hill to the river. “My chance with the Great Western is gone,” he muttered, “and all on account of a confounded little cat, and called ‘Beelzebub’ at that! Harrigan would fix me now if I went in, that’s certain. Accidents happen in the camps and the victims come out, feet first, or don’t come out at all and no questions asked. No, I’ll have to look for something else. Hang it!” he exclaimed, rubbing his arm, “this being squire of dames and kittens don’t pay.”
Unconsciously he followed the trail down to the dam, across the gorge, and on up the opposite slope. The second-growth maple, birch, and poplar gave place to heavy beech, spruce, and pine as he went on. Presently he was in the thick of a regiment of great spruce trees that stood rigidly at “attention.” The shadows deepened and the small noises of the riverside died away. A turn in the trail and a startled doe faced him, slender-legged, tense with surprise, wide ears pointed forward and nostrils working.
He stopped. The deer, instead of snorting and bounding away, moved deliberately across the trail and into a screen of undergrowth opposite him. David stood motionless. Then from the bushes came a little fawn, timidly, lifting its front feet with quick, jerky motions, but placing them with the instinctive caution of the wild kindred. Scarcely had the fawn appeared when another, smaller and dappled beautifully, followed. Their motions were mechanical, muscles set, as if ready to leap to a wild run in a second.
What unheard, unseen signal the doe gave to her offspring, David never knew, but, as though they had received a terse command, the two fawns wheeled suddenly and bounded up the trail, at the top of which the doe was standing. Three white flags bobbed over the crest and they were gone.
“How on earth did that doe circle to the hillside without my seeing her?” he thought. Then he laughed as he remembered the stiff-legged antics of the fawns as they bounded away, stirring a noisy squirrel to rebuke. On he went, over the crest and down a gentle slope, past giant beeches and yellow birch whose python-like roots crept over the moss and disappeared as though slowly writhing from the sunlight to subterranean fastnesses. Dwarfed and distorted cedars sprung up along the way and he knew he was near water. In a few minutes he stood on the shore of No-Man’s Lake, whose unruffled surface reflected the broad shadow of Timberland Mountain on the opposite shore.