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.

He stood there a moment with his dog, bent a little, peering in.  He had come to find “that there pesky cat.”  And in this, perhaps, he showed more sense than most people gave him credit for.  Apparently, he had seen enough to know that the cat was quite unlike any ordinary cat—­and cats of any kind are bad enough—­and certainly he guessed that the cat under control of its master was one, and away from that questionable influence likely to be another, and very much worse, calamity.