“What did they have?”
“Don't ask me,” urged Zene; “I'd like to forget it. There was vittles, but they tasted so funny. And they kept inquirin' where I's goin' and who was with me. They was the uneasiest people you ever see. And nothing would do but I must sleep in the house. There was two rooms. I didn't see till I was in bed, that the only door I could get out of let into the room where the man and woman stayed.”
Robert Day began to consider the part of Ohio through which his caravan was passing, a weird and unwholesome region, full of shivering delights. While the landscape lay warm, glowing and natural around him, it was luxury to turn cold at Zene's night-peril.
“I couldn't go to sleep,” continued Zene, “and I kind of kept my eye on the only window there was.”
Robert drew a sigh of relief as he reflected that an enemy watching at the window would be sure Zene was looking just in the opposite direction.
“And the man and woman they whispered.”
“What did they whisper about?”
“How do I know?” said Zene mysteriously. “Whisper—whisper—whisper—z-z! That's the way they kept on. Sometimes I thought he's threatenin' her, and sometimes I thought she's threatenin' him. But along in the middle of the night they hushed up whisperin'. And then I heard somebody open the outside door and go out. I s'ze to myself, 'Nows the time to be up and ready.' So I was puttin' on the clothes I'd took off, and right there on the bed, like it had been there all the time, was two great big eyes turnin' from green to red, and flame comin' out of them like it does out of coals when the wind blows.”
“Was it a cat?” whispered Robert Day, hoping since Zene was safe, that it was not.
Zene passed the insinuation with a derisive puff. He would not stoop to parley about cats in a peril so extreme.