Part 15

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The very last pale rays of a watery setting sun slid bar-like through the cottage window, and fell, twirling, aslant the floor.

A late spider had spun a web across the fireplace, and the one last fly that always lingers sat in the sunbeam. It was Hawkley's cottage, dismantled and derelict.

Something like a furry round hassock, lying motionless in a far corner, moved at the sound of rain, and lifted a round head with round eyes that glared with so terrible an expression that one caught one's breath. There was blood--dried blood--by the furry shape, and drops of dried blood across the floor from the window in the next room, that it had been nobody's business to shut.

The day went out in gloom and howling rain-rushes. Darkness took possession of the room. And--the gate clicked.

Truly, it might only have been the wind, but--Pharaoh was on his feet in a flash, growling, and there was a glint of green-yellow light as his eyes whipped round.

Followed a pause. Then, in a lull, once, twice, the unmistakable crunch of a shod foot on gravel.

Another pause. Pharaoh was crouching close now, trembling from head to foot.

"Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Pharaoh, old cat, are--are you in there?"

The voice, strained and husky, came in at the open window. In the last lingering afterglow of dying day, a face, haggard and set, showed there, framed in the lead casement.

"Phar---- Ah!"

Pharaoh was up. Pharaoh had given a strange, coaxing little cry, such as a she-cat gives to her kittens. Pharaoh, lame and stiff, but with tail straight as a poker, was running to the window in the next room, was up on the sill, was rubbing against and caressing the haggard face like a mad thing.

There was a long, tense pause, broken only by a continuous purring. Then the creaking sound as of the lid of a wicker basket being opened. The purring ceased. The creaking came again, as if the lid were being shut. There came the crunch once more of stealthy shod feet on gravel, the click of the gate, and--silence!

Hawkley had come for, and found, his cat.

THE CRIPPLE

It was gradually getting colder and colder as he flew, till at last, in a wonderful, luminous, clear, moonlit sunset, when day passed, lingering almost imperceptibly, into night, the wind fixed in the north, and a hard white frost shone on the glistening roofs--far, far below.

Up there, at the three-thousand or four-thousand feet level, where he was flying, the air was as clear and sparkling as champagne, and as still as the tomb. If he had been passing over the moon instead of over the earth, the effect would have been something like it, perhaps.

He was only a thrush, Turdus philomelus the songster, but big and dull and dark for his kind, and he had come from--well, behind him, all shimmering and restless in the moonlight, like a fountain-basin full of quicksilver, lay the North Sea; ahead and beneath lay England; and across that sea, three hundred miles, as I count it, at the very least, to the lands of melting snow, he was going when late cold weather had caught him and warned him to come back. And alone? No, sirs, not quite. Ahead, just visible, blurredly--a little phantom form rose and fell on the magic air; behind, another; on his right, a third--all thrushes, flying steadily westward in silence; and there may have been a few more that could not be seen, or there may not.

His crop, as were the crops of the others, was perfectly empty. Indeed, he appeared to prefer traveling in ballast that way. But his eyes shone, and his wing-strokes, with little pauses of rigidity between, such as many birds take--only one doesn't notice it much--were strong and sure.

Once a large-winged, smudged shape, making no sound as it slipped across the heavens, came flapping almost up to him, peering this way and that at him and his companions, with amber flaming eyes set in a cat-like, oval face. The thrush's heart gave a great jump, and seemed threatening to choke him, for that shape--and it howled at him suddenly, in a voice calculated to make strong men jump--was death of the night, otherwise a short-eared owl.

But a gun went "boomp!" with that thick, damp sort of sound that smacks of black powder, somewhere down on earth, and a huge "herd" of green plover, alias peewits, which are lapwings, rose, as if blown up by an explosion, to meet them, their thousand wings flickering in the frost-haze like a shower of confetti, and the owl was so disconcerted by the disturbance that he dropped back into the night whence he came, as one who falls into a sea.

Then suddenly the thrush--all the thrushes, indeed--tipped tails, and flew downward--offering no explanation to help one to understand why--till they dropped, each one entirely on his own hook, apparently, in or about some gardens, as if they had tumbled out of the sky; and our thrush, in twenty seconds, had slipped into some apple-trees, and thence to some laurels round a shed, and--was asleep! I say "was asleep." Out of the starry sky, down, in under, and asleep--all without emotion, and like a machine. Now, what is one to make of such a bird?

He did not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see--for I do not know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really--the lean, lithe, long, low weasel that passed, climbing and sniffing, beneath him--within six inches--possibly scenting out a rat. He did not hear, or show that he heard, the blackbird--she was rusty, dark brown, as a matter of actual fact--scream, a piercing and public-spirited scream, when the very big claws of a little, round, spotted-feathered ball with wings, like a parody of a cherub--but men call it a little owl, really--closed upon her and squeezed, or pierced, out her life. He did not feel, or let on that he felt, the branches gently sway as two eyes, glinting back the light of the moon--eyes which were the property of a "silver tabby" female cat--floated among the twigs, looking for him, him most certainly, whom she seemed faintly to smell, but never saw.

These things represented tense moments dotted through hours of cold, dark silence, and the blue-black dome of night arched, and the moon drifted, all in rigid, cold, and appalling stillness.

Then the wind changed, and our thrush awoke to a "muggy" day, under a soaked, cotton-wool, gray sky, all sodden with streaming showers of rain. And, by that token alone, he must have known that he was in England. No other climate is capable of such crazy, unwarned, health-trying changes. He had come in an icy, practically petrified silence. He left in a steaming, swishing, streaming gale.

But that was not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded" themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it came up, not joyfully, but tugged, to be hammered and shaken into something not too disgustingly alive to be swallowed.

Then, while a robin mounted to a spruce-spire and acted as Job's comforter to all the birds of the garden by singing--ah, so plaintively and sweetly!--of the dismal days of frost and snow, he "preened"--i.e. went over and combed every feather, and tested and retested, cleaned and recleaned, each vital quill. Then, in one single, watery, weak stab of apology for sunshine, on the top of a fowl-shed, he surrendered himself to what, in wild-bird land, is known as the "sunning reaction," which really consists of giving body and mind utterly to the sun and complete rest.

And then he left.