Next instant both black rats had gone off together like sparks—­if ever sparks were black—­and the brown rat, coming through the hole, wondered what on earth had happened.  Then he sniffed at their trail, tried, but found it impossible, to follow, and passed on.  He would have felt great pleasure in slaying them if he could, and they knew that.

The black rat now essayed to cross the yard to the stable.  He could not very well stop there—­up among the rafters, that is—­all night, so he came down, and, with his wife following him, gingerly rustled out upon the partially snow-covered straw.

Then he got a shock that turned him into a winking series of black streaks.

Then he got another shock which turned him, literally, into—­well, into black lightning.  You never saw anything like it in all your life.  You never would have believed that any living beast could have so frantically and so furiously got itself about from place to place so instantaneously.  It was—­dazzling.  It made you blink.  It was It in the agility line, and no mistake.

Firstly, the brown rat, having hidden up in some black corner, with brown-rat cunning, came hopping out instantly—­nay, charging—­on the black rat’s trail.  And there was murder in his wicked, little, glinting eyes at he came.

Secondly, a white eider-down quilt—­at least, that was what it seemed like—­descended lightly as—­as an eider quilt, and as soundlessly, out of the blue-black sky, and covered the brown rat up.  You could hear his horrid, muffled screaming of rage and fear under the quilt; you could see the quilt—­but they saw that it looked pale brown on top—­lifting about, and feeling for that murder-child of a rat underneath.  Then the quilt got him—­you could hear the unspeakably beastly death-squeal reverberate mufflingly—­and then the quilt rose, still utterly without sound, and one saw it was a big barn-owl, with a rat—­a brown rat—­twitching in its white-mittened claws.

But do you think that made any difference?  If so, you don’t know the cruel devil of perseverance that is the brown rat.

As the black rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt—­he could not stop—­clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague—­other rats usually answer it—­coming out of a hole.  The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and was after them.

The barn was an unfortunate choice.  It seemed full of brown rats, and four of them, in the darkness, instantly took up the pursuit of the now fairly hunted black couple.  Nothing but their miraculous agility saved those two from being eaten alive, but they came out of the barn on to the spotless snow on the far side, with only a foot to spare between their long tails and the mangy, scarred head of the leading brown fiend behind them.