“Bless us, I’ll look,” I whispered, walking toward the back of the room.
It might have been my fancy or my own reflection, but whatever it was, I thought I saw a dark and muffled thing move outside. It forced a scream from me, and that one little cry was enough to bring the Judge up out of his chair, knowing well enough without words that I had seen something.
“That’s enough!” he said, his long legs striding toward the French windows. “Stand back, Margaret. We’ll look into this.”
He tore the glass doors open, the bitter cold wind flickered the lamp, and by some sensible instinct I pulled the cord of the oil burner. I knew that as he stood on the balcony, looking, he could see nothing with a light behind him. Furthermore, I did not move, because I knew that he was listening, too. Both of us heard the scrape of something on the icy garden walk, the moment the lights went out. Immediately after it the Judge called to me.
“Look!” he said. “Isn’t something moving there along the shrubs?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “It’s near the ground. It crawls.”
“What do you want?” called the Judge to the moving thing. Then, although he had no revolver at hand, he said, “Answer, or I’ll shoot.”
The only reply to this was the sound of breathing and one little cough that sounded human. The Judge reached behind him with one long arm, feeling around the little table by the window for some object. At last his fingers closed on it and I knew he had the little bronze elephant that now stands on the mantel, where Mrs. Estabrook turns it so it will not show that it has lost its tail.
“We are a pair of old fools,” said the Judge, as if he was not sure. “It probably is a cat.”
With these words he poised the bronze that was solid and must have weighed two pounds, and hurled it into the garden. There was a sound of striking flesh that a body can tell from all others. I heard it! And then, quicker than I tell it, the sharp clear air was filled with a cry which died away, as if it had flown up to the milky, starry sky and left us listening to strange, inhuman groans coming up from the garden.