Part 12

Now, those of the wild-folk who approach the farm, even by night, do so with their life in their paws, and most of them know it. Far, far safer would it be to remain in wood or field-hedge, gorse-patch or growing crop. Yet they go, like the adventurers of old.

First of all, if he approached by ditch, before getting to the farm proper, the hedgehog knew that he must pass the entrenchments of the rat-folk, and that alone was enough to put off many, for the rat-folk are no longer strictly wild, and, wild or tame, are hated with that cordiality that only fear can impose. I don't know that our hedgehog was given to fearing anything very much. He came of a brave race, and one cursed, moreover, with a vile, quick temper, more than likely to squash in its incipient stage any fear that might threaten to exist; but he did most emphatically detest rats, except to eat them--a compliment which the rats would have returned, if they had got a chance.

As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that Prickles--for such was the name of our hedgehog--would have gone that risky way, traveled so unhealthily far, left his more or less--mostly less--safe home wood at all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with men--in the warm seasons--their fancy turns to thoughts of love. Prickles's fancy had so turned, not lightly, for he was of an ancient and antediluvian race, heavy in thought, but certainly to love. And love, I want you to realize, in the wild, or anywhere else, for the matter of that, is the very devil. "Unite and multiply; there is no other law or aim than love," one great savant despairingly assorts is Nature's cry, and adds that she mutters to herself under her breath, "and exist afterwards if you can. That is no concern of mine."

To be precise, Prickles, who did more business with his nose than all the rest of his organs put together, was following a love-trail. A lady hedgehog, a flapper undoubtedly, and beautiful--all loves are beautiful in imagination--had passed that way. Why that unhealthful way, Heaven knew; but, allowing for the capriciousness of the sex, and mad because in love, Prickles followed, slowly, deliberately, heavily, as befitted one descended from one of the oldest races on earth.

The air was heavy with the scent of may and of honeysuckle, and his way was a green-gold--silver where the moon cascaded down the hedge--and blue-black bridal-path, arched with scented swords, strewn with pink and rose and cream and white confetti of blossom. But he only saw and smelt one thing, and that, those who have known hedgehogs intimately will agree, is not like unto the scent of any blossom.

Prickles was ruminating anciently upon these things, possibly, and others, as he came down the trench--ditch, I mean--when the cry smote him. It smote everything--the filtered silence of the wonderful, tranquil night, the pale moon half-light, the furtive rustling shadows that stopped rustling, the wonderful breathing pulse of growing vegetation. And Prickles stopped as abruptly as if it had smitten him on his nose, too. He heard that, at any rate, whatever might have been hinted about the value of his ears elsewhere.

There was no doubt about that cry, no possible shadow of doubt whatever--it was a cry of extreme distress, a final, despairing S.O.S., flung out to the night in the frantic hope that one of the same species would hear and help.

Several night-foraging wild-folk have S.O.S. signals of their own, but none like this. It was not a rabbit's cry, for bunny's signal is thin and child-like; nor a hare's, for puss's last scream is like bunny's, only more so; nor a stoat's, for that is instinct with anger as well as pain; nor a cat's, for that thrills with hate; nor an owl's, for that is ghostly; nor a fox's, for Reynard is dumb then; nor a rat's, for that is gibbering and devilish; nor a mouse's, for that is weak and helpless. Then what? And why had it touched up Prickles as if with a live wire? It was perhaps the rarest S.O.S. signal of all heard in the wild, or one of the rarest, the peculiar, high, chattering, pig-like, savage tremolo of a hedgehog booked for some extra deathly form of death. And Prickles--naturally he knew it.

It came from straightaway down the ditch; from ahead, where Prickles had been heading for; from the farm, and Heaven know what it portended! Perhaps, too, Prickles could tell a lady hedgehog's S.O.S. from that of a gentleman of the same breed; or, perhaps--but how do I know? He certainly acted that way.

Prickles waited the one-fifth part of an instant, to listen and locate. Then he got going, and provided one astonishment. Till then he had seemed slow as the times he had descended from--like a rhinoceros. But, like a rhino, he proved that he could shift some when hustled. He did. It looked like suddenly releasing a clockwork toy wound up to breaking-point. His short legs gave this impression, and his next-to-no-neck, giving him a look of rigidity, assisted it. He did not run so much as rush, and his spines and bristles, coming low on either side in an overhang, so to speak, like an armored car, made him rustle and scuffle tremendously. Three rabbits doing the same act, or five cats, could scarce have made more row than he did.

It was not, however, so much the fact that Prickles had gone that was so noticeable as the fact that he had arrived. His arrival seemed to follow his going as one slide follows another on a screen. One would never have believed such quickness of him; nor, as a matter of fact, do I think he would have believed it of himself; but--well, love is a mighty power, and makes folks do some strange things.

What he found was two ditch-banks, pock-marked with the untidy dug-outs of the rat-people, smelling ratty, and looking worse, one original ray of moonlight lighting the beaten ditch between. In the moonlight one young female hedgehog, who may have been pretty by hedgehog standards, but was now pretty by none, and five rats, frankly beastly, very busy indeed with that same hedgehog. They must have caught that young lady of the spikes "napping"--a rare thing. Yet, allowing for the fact that she was in love--with love and nothing else, so far--and careless, or allowing that she may have mistaken the unclean ones momentarily, she may have given them one brief half-instant. And it doesn't do to give a rat even the half of a half-instant. If you do, he has got you, or you haven't got him.

Apparently they had pretty well got her before she could quite roll up, and in a half-rolled-up condition she was doing her best to meet the jabs of five pairs of gnawing, cold-chisel, incisor, yellow-rats' teeth at once. To time, apparently, she had not been successful in the attempt--you could see the dark stains of blood glisten in the moonlight, and the end was certain, on the face of it.

Prickles, however, was a new factor that had got to short-circuit that end, and Prickles didn't wait to meditate prehistorically that time. He came. He came full tilt into the midst of the melee like--well, like a clockwork toy still, that couldn't stop. Only he did stop, against the biggest rat of all, ducking his head, and jerking forward his shoulder-muscles, and spines, with a sort of a thrust over his head, and a noise like a pair of expiring bellows; and the prickles hit home.

That rat removed about one foot in one bound in one-fortieth of a second, and he let rip one squeal in the process that sent away every other rat into the nearest available hole as if it had been fired there from a spring. Then the lady hedgehog took the Heaven-sent opportunity to complete her rolling-up completely, and Prickles took his own created opportunity to roll up almost more completely, and--well, they were rolled up into two balls, you see, and there is nothing more to be said about them. The rats did that, but it was all they did, except hurt their noses presently, and delicate, pink, hand-like fore-paws, and make 'em bleed on prickles. They were very angry indeed, those unspeakable ones--very angry; but it didn't make any difference to the hedgehogs. They were there; they were rolled up; they were together. What could make any difference after that? And at last, when the rats gave them up as a very bad job, they went away together, and that's all there is to say. Together clinches it, you understand.

PHARAOH

Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a cottage of four rooms. He "did" for himself. Every housekeeper will know what "did" for himself means. But he did for himself in another way also. He came to read up for an exam. He told everybody this, which was one reason why he would be seen at ungodly hours, when no one was about, going to and from lonely spots, with a pair of blue glasses on his nose, a book under one arm, and a walking-stick with a silver band and a tassel--he was always careful to display the silver band and the tassel--under the other.

Then Nemesis descended upon him.

He was caught by Colonel Lymington's head-keeper on Colonel Lymington's most strictly preserved wild-bird sanctuary, shooting certain rare birds--many rare birds. Now, the colonel prided himself on his sanctuary, and upon the number of rare birds he had living therein, and the colonel was wroth. Hawkley had, in fact, ruined the sanctuary, and taken or slain pretty well every other bird worth having in the place, so that five years would not make good the harm he had done. Moreover, it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his cat--especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.

No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy, in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went. He went more quickly than was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the police of another district--several other districts, I think--to say that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on his face, and was no more seen.

So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat. He left it at home in the cottage--which shows that he must have been badly scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's agent, such as Hawkley was. But perhaps he left it by way of revenge. I do not know. Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa before the fire--just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities, had left it that morning.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when the cat, Pharaoh, woke up, and transformed himself instantly from deep sleep to strained alertness, in that way which is peculiar to the children of the wild, but has been lost by their domestic degenerates. The sun was shining full in at the little diamond-paned window. The window was open, and a late fly of metallic hue was shooting about with a pinging noise, like the twang of some instrumental string. But neither fly, nor sun, nor the tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece had awakened the cat. It was the click of the little front-gate latch.

The cat--the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow stone--gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square" bowler hat--not often seen these days--and a red face with small eyes, and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. The cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread. Hawkley had a white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes--the eyes that an animal may love and trust. Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon. Anyway, he acted as if he did.

Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and to the door leading into the scullery. For a moment he stopped, looking back over his shoulder, one paw uplifted, body drooping on bent legs, inscrutable, fierce eyes staring. Then he was gone.

I don't know how he went. He just seemed to fade out in the frame of the doorway and into the shadowed coolth of the scullery like a dissolving picture.

A pause followed, while the little clock on the mantel-piece ticked hurriedly, as if anxious to get on and pass over an awkward moment.

Came then the click of the front-door latch, the flinging open of the door wide, the bar-like gleam of hastily raised gun-barrels in the new flood of light, and--silence. Only the one or two late flies "pinged," while the little clock fairly raced.

The tall, uncompromising figure of the head-keeper was standing in the doorway, with a double-barreled 12-bore gun half-raised.