He had solved the riddle first by putting it down to some trick of his eyesight, but the keenness of his vision was proverbial in Jamestown, and that did not long content him. Then he took a tape-line and measured a paw, and waited for the stretching process. It came. The huge Maltese stretched out his forepaws in languorous indolence. Bing promptly caught one and began to measure; the cat instantly contracted its muscles. Bing strove to hold the paw out by force, with the result that the cat (which was of the giant order, and no degenerate descendant of its wild progenitors) fixed its teeth through the fleshy part of his thumb, from which it was with difficulty disengaged. The wound inflamed and festered, but the symptoms disappeared in a week or two. Shortly after the cat died in a fit.
The dilation and contraction of the eyes of animals was a source of continual speculation to Bing; a matter he strove in horrid ways to elucidate. There was something hideously repulsive in this boy's secret cruelties, horrible to relate, sickening to contemplate. But the creatures he tormented, maimed, killed, knew neither anticipation nor remembrance; the "corporeal pang" was all.
There was a strange and horrible parallel between his nature and the nature of the women who tortured so ceaselessly the woman whom fate had made their victim; a little difference in method, a little divergence of application, a slight change from the physical to the mental world—that was all save a dreadful difference in the victim; but the instinct of cruelty was the same.
There is an organized society in one of our great cities for putting dumb animals out of pain—out of existence. It had been well for Myron Holder had she been one of those creatures to which a merciful death is vouchsafed. The lilied purity of her womanhood might be gone, but we do not rend the petals of even spent flowers. It is hard to tread upon even a crushed blossom, and painful to see a broken lily flung to smother in a sewer.
CHAPTER X.
"Desolation is a delicate thing.
It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air,
But treads with killing footsteps, and fans with silent wing,
The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear;
Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above,
And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet,
Dream visions of aerial joy, and call the monster Love,
And wake, and find the shadow Pain...."
"The smoke is falling, the ducks and geese are flying about, the maple leaves are turned underside up, the cocks are crowing, the cat is eating grass, the gulls have left the lake and fly over the land, the flies sting, and the cement on the cellar floor is damp, so I think it's going to rain; and if it does, I ain't a-going to begin to color my rags," said Mrs. Deans, standing arms akimbo on the doorstep.
"Yes," said her husband, "it's a deal like rain; the moon had a shroud on it last night, and the frogs croaked terrible, and my rheumatics has just been ramping."
"Yes," went on Mrs. Deans, "my corns has ached intolerable, and the cows have been lowing since daybreak; there's no doubt but what it's going to rain. I wonder if Myron Holder is a-coming, or if she ain't!"