A voiceless interval while we climbed a trail to the timbered bench where fence posts were being cut by half a dozen of the Arrowhead forces.  Two of these were swiftly detached and bade to repair the break in the fence by which one Timmins was now profiting, the entire six being first regaled with a brief but pithy character analysis of the offender, portraying him as a loathsome biological freak; headless, I gathered, and with the acquisitive instincts of a trade rat.

Then we rounded back on our way to the Arrow head ranch house.  Five miles up the narrowing valley we could see its outposts and its smoke.  Far below us the spick-and-span buildings of deserted Broadmoor glittered newly, demanding that I be told more of them.  Yet for the five-mile ride I added, as I thought, no item to my slender stock.  Instead, when we had descended from the bench and were again in fields where the gates might be opened only by galling effort, I learned apparently irrelevant facts concerning Egbert Floud’s pet kitten.

“Yes, sir; he’s just like any old maid with that cat.  ‘Kitty!’ here and ‘Kitty!’ there; and ‘Poor Kitty, did I forget to warm its milk?’ And so on.  It was give to him two years ago by Jeff Tuttle’s littlest girl, Irene; and he didn’t want it at first, but him and Irene is great friends, so he pretended he was crazy about it and took it off in his overcoat pocket, thinking it would die anyway, because it was only skin and bones.  Whenever it tried to purr you’d think it was going to shake all its timbers loose.  His house is just over on the other side of Arrowhead Pass there, and I saw the kitten the first day he brought it up, kind of light brown and yellow in colour, with some gray on the left shoulder.

“Well, the minute I see these markings I recognized ’em and remembered something, and I says right off that he’s got some cat there; and he says how do I know?  And I tell him that there kitten has got at least a quarter wildcat in it.  Its grandmother, or mebbe its great-grandmother, was took up to the Tuttle Ranch when there wasn’t another cat within forty miles, and it got to running round nights; and quite a long time after that they found it with a mess of kittens in a box out in the harness room.  One look at their feet and ears was all you’d want to see that their pa was a bobcat.  They all become famous fighting characters, and was marked just like this descendant of theirs that Cousin Egbert has.  And, say, I was going on like this, not suspecting anything except that I was giving him some interesting news about the family history of this pet of his, when he grabs the beast up and cuddles it, and says I had ought to be ashamed of myself, talking that way about a poor little innocent kitten that never done me a stroke of harm.  Yes, sir; he was right fiery.