But she shook her head. "Not this summer—that cat has spent these last two summers with human beings who have treated him as a kind of fetich—just as we do!" As she rubbed his ear she murmured regretfully: "To think of all you've heard and seen and done, and you can't tell us one thing!"
The Yellow Cat's eyes narrowed to mere slits of black across two amber agates; then he shook his ears free, yawned, and gave himself up to closed lids and dreams. If he could have told it all, just as it happened, not one word of it could those good souls have comprehended—and this was the way of it.
It was near the close of a June day when the cat made his entrance into that hidden life of the summers from which his exits had been as sudden, though less dramatic. In the heart of the hills, where a mountain torrent has fretted its way for miles through a rocky gorge, there is a place where the cleft widens into a miniature valley, and the stream slips along quietly between banks of moss before it plunges again on its riotous path down the mountain. Here the charcoal-burners, half a century ago, had made a clearing, and left their dome-shaped stone kiln to cover itself with the green velvet and lace of lichen and vine. The man who was stooping over the water, cleaning trout for his supper, had found it so and made it his own one time in his wandering quest for solitude. The kiln now boasted a chimney, a door, and one wide window that looked away over the stream's next plunge, over other mountains and valleys to far horizons of the world of men. This was the hermitage to which he brought his fagged-out nerves from the cormorant city that feeds on the blood and brains of humans. Here through the brief truce of summer he found time to fish and hunt enough for his daily wants, time to read, to write, time to dream and to smoke his evening pipe, to think long thoughts, and more blessed than all—to sleep! When autumn came he would go back with renewed life and a pile of manuscript to feed to his hungry cormorant. He was chewing the cud of contentment as he bent to his fish cleaning, when, glancing to one side where the fire, between stones, was awaiting his frying-pan, he caught sight among the bushes of two gleaming eyes, and then the sleek back and lashing tail of the Yellow Cat. The man, being a cat lover was versed in their ways, so for a time he paid no attention, then began to talk softly.
"If you'd come out of that," he said, as he scraped the scales, "and not sit there watching me like a Comanche Indian, I'd invite you to supper!"
Whether it was the tone of his voice or the smell of the fish that conquered, the tawny creature was suddenly across the open with a rush and on the stooping shoulders. That was the beginning of the companionship that lasted until fall. The next season brought the animal as unexpectedly, and they took up the old relation where it had left off the previous summer. They trudged together through miles of forest, sometimes the cat on the man's shoulder, but often making side excursions on his own account and coming back with the proud burden of bird or tiny beast. Together they watched the days decline in red and gold glory from the ledge where the stream drops over the next height, or when it rained, companioned each other by the hearth in the hut. There was between them that satisfying and intimate communion of inarticulate speech only possible between man and beast.
There came a day when the man sat hour after hour over his writing, letting the hills call in vain. The cat slept himself out, and when paws in the ink and tracks over the paper proved of no avail, he jumped down and marched himself haughtily off through the door and across the clearing to the forest, tail in air. Late that afternoon the man was arrested midway of a thought rounding into phrase by the sudden darkness. There was a fierce rush of wind, as if some giant had sighed and roused himself. The door of the hut slammed shut and the blast from the window scattered the papers about the floor. As he went to pull down the sash the cat sprang in, shaking from his feet the drops of rain already slanting in a white sheet across the little valley. At the same moment there was a "halloo" outside, and a woman burst open the door, turning quickly to shut out behind her the onrush of the shower and the biting cold of the wind. She stood shaking the drops from her hair, and then she looked into the astonished face of the man and laughed.
She was as slim and straight as a young poplar, clad in white shirt-waist and khaki Turkish trousers with gaiters laced to the knee. Her hair was blown about in a red-gold snarl, and her eyes looked out as unabashed as a boy's. The two stared at each other for a time in silence, and finally it was the woman who spoke first.
"This isn't exactly what I call a warm welcome—not just what the cat led me to expect! It was really the cat who brought me—I met him over on Slide Mountain—he fled and I pursued, and now here we are!"
She made a hasty survey of the hut, and then of its owner, putting her head on one side as she looked about her with a quick, bird-like movement, he still staring in stupefaction.
"Of course you detest having me here, but you won't put me out in the rain, again, will you?"