As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too.  He went straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath.  A lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley, I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be following up behind.

Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond.  That showed strategy.  The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted, gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed with rabbit-runs; a world unto itself.

The cat moved on quickly into the heart of the furze, pausing every few strides to listen and glare round.  Several times he sniffed the sickly grass and the carpet of dead spikes.

Once or twice something moved ahead; a branch was shaking as he came up, a blade of grass slowly righting itself, as if something that had been sitting upon it had but just stolen away.  All round were hints of life, but no life was visible.  It was as if the cat were moving through an army of ghosts.

Then, in a flash, without any kind of hint or warning to prepare one for the unnerving contrast of the change, was war—­raw, red war.

There had come up a rabbit-run—­a regular rabbit-turnpike—­a creature.  It was strikingly colored, that creature, and big—­nearly three feet long, to be exact; but it looked much bigger in the ghostly twilight—­and yet till it was actually upon him he, even he, had failed to see it.

Long, low, bear-like, and burly, with claws caked with earth, gashed and bleeding on flank and shoulder it was, red-fanged and wild-eyed.  It charged home upon Pharaoh without a second’s pause, and with an obscene chatter that was unnerving to any one, let alone so highly strung a bag of tricks as a cat.

Men and dogs had been besieging this badger in its den for twelve hours.  It had in the end made a desperate sortie, upset one man who had failed to grab its tail, run into and bitten another, and got clean away.  Pharaoh was unfortunate in that he stood between the half-mad beast and another den for which it was making.

There was no time to go back, no room to execute one of those beautiful lightning side-leaps which are the pride of all the cats, and less to spring into the air, a neat trick of the tribe which it has also perfected.

The cat was cornered, and, being cornered, fought like—­a cornered cat!  That is to say, an electrified devil.