“Hang your infernal cat!  It’s an outrage for you to be endangering the lives of people with your diabolical schemes for getting at a beas’ that ought to’ve been killed long ago.”

Then Butterwick sullenly got over the fence and went home, and the cat meanwhile kept up a yowling that made everybody’s hair stand on end.

Potts said that he made a mistake in not placing the butt of the spout against something solid.  And so, after putting in a couple of pounds of powder, he turned the spout up and rested the end upon the ground, propping it against the pump.  Then he lighted the slow-match, and the crowd scattered.  There was a loud explosion, a general distribution of fragments of tin around the yard, and then out from the upper end of the spout there sailed something black.  It ascended; it went higher and higher and higher, until it was a mere speck; then it came sailing down, down, down, until it struck the earth.  It was the cat, singed off, burned to a crisp, looking as if it had been spending the summer in Vesuvius, but apparently still active and hearty; for as soon as it alighted it set up a wild, unearthly screech and darted off for the woodshed, where it continued to howl until Potts went in and killed it with his shotgun.  It cost him forty dollars for a new spout, but he says he doesn’t grudge the money now that he has stopped that fiendish noise.

* * * * *

Potts’ clock got out of order one day last winter and began to strike wrong.  That was the cause of the fearful excitement at his house on a certain night.  They were all in bed sound asleep at midnight, when the clock suddenly struck five.  The new hired girl, happening to wake just as it began, heard it, and bounced out of bed under the impression that morning had come.  And as it is dark at 5 A.M. just at that season, she did not perceive her mistake, but went down into the kitchen and began to get breakfast.

[Illustration:  SHOOTING A BURGLAR]

While she was bustling about in a pretty lively manner, Potts happened to wake, and he heard the noise.  He opened his room door cautiously and crept softly to the head of the stairs to listen.  He could distinctly hear some one moving about the kitchen and dining-room and apparently packing up the china.  Accordingly, he went back to his room and woke Mrs. Potts, and gave her orders to spring the rattle out of the front window the moment she heard his gun go off.  Then Potts seized his fowling-piece; and going down to the dining-room door, where he could hear the burglars at work, he cocked the gun, aimed it, pushed the door open with the muzzle and fired.  Instantly Mrs. Potts sprang the rattle, and before Potts could pick up the lacerated hired girl the front door was burst open by two policemen, who came into the dining-room.