One of the girls soon proposed that the old fiddler should play a few tunes to the animals, which were now whining in their cage.
The darkey accordingly took his violin, which he had clung to through all their mad drive, and struck up "Money Musk," which he played as correctly and in as good time as was possible under the circumstance. Soon collecting his nerve and coolness as he went on, he scraped out his whole répertoire of dancing tunes, "St. Patrick's day in the morning," "The Irish Washerwoman," "Pop goes the Weasel," winding up with a "Breakdown and Fishers' Hornpipe."
The effect of the music, while it cheered and amused the girls in their strange situation, seemed to have a directly contrary effect on the wolves, who crouched, yelped, and trembled until they seemed utterly powerless and harmless. What threatened to be a tragedy was in this way turned into something that resembled a comedy.
By daylight Mr. Carter, with his son and two negroes, arrived on the scene, armed to the teeth with guns and axes, and made short work with the brutes, climbing on the roof of the cabin and descending into the loft from which place they shot them in detail. The bounty which at that time was paid for wolves' heads was awarded to Miss Carter by whose ingenuity the brutes were trapped.
The wild cat of this continent is said to be the lineal descendant of "the harmless, necessary cat," which the early emigrants brought over with them from Europe, among their other four-footed friends and companions. Certain depraved and perverse representatives of this domestic creature took to the woods, and, becoming outlaws from society, reverted to their original savage state. Their offspring waxed in size and fierceness beyond their progenitors. They became at last proverbial for their fighting qualities, and to be able to "whip one's weight in wild cats," is a terse expression signifying strength.
The fecundity of this animal, as well as its predatory skill, makes it an extremely frequent and annoying poacher on the poultry-yards of the backwoods settlers, especially in the hill districts of the Southern States, where the climate and the abundance of game appear to have developed them to an uncommon size and fierceness.
Their strength and ferocity was fully tested by a settler's wife, in the upper part of Alabama, some fifty years ago, as will appear from the following account:
Mrs. Julia Page, a widow, with three small children, occupied a house in a broken and well-wooded country, some miles west of the present town of Huntsville, where the only serious annoyance and drawback was the immense number of these animals which prowled through the woods and decimated the poultry. Stumpy tailed, green eyed, they strolled through the clearing and sunned themselves on the limbs of neighboring trees, blinking calmly at the clucking hens which they marked for their prey, and even venturing to throw suspicious glances at the infant sleeping in its cradle. Sociable in their disposition, they appeared to even claim a kind of proprietary interest in the premises and in the appurtenances thereof.
Shooting a dozen and trapping as many more, made little appreciable difference in the numbers of the feline colony. The dame at last constructed with much labor a close shed, within which her poultry were nightly housed. This worked well for a season. But one evening a commotion in the hennery informed her that the depredators were again at work. Hastily seizing an axe in one hand and carrying a lighted pitch pine knot in the other, she hurried to the scene of action, and found Grimalkin feasting sumptuously on her plumpest pullet. The banqueters were evidently a mother and her well-grown son, whom she was instructing in the predatory art and practice.
The younger animal immediately clambered to the hole where it had made its entrance, and was about to make a successful exit, when the matron, sticking the lighted knot in the ground, struck the animal with the axe, breaking its back and bringing it to the ground. Without an instant's warning, the mother cat sprang upon Mrs. Page, and fastening its powerful claws in her breast, tore savagely at her neck with its teeth.