Straight across the open, like a drawn black bar, they shot, to a towering building of wood, and along this—­here they lost six inches of the precious twelve by which they led—­looking for a hole.  They found it, whizzed in, five brown rats close behind them, nine brown rats hard behind the five.

They discovered themselves in a great room half-filled with sacks and the sweet smell of corn, and in and out among these sacks they led their hunters such a dizzy chase as no man ever witnessed, or could witness, for the matter of that, since human eyes could not follow it.  But the end seemed positive, anyway.  It was only a question of tiring the black sparks out, for the four brown rats in the place, engaged upon lowering the weight of the flour in the sacks—­one of those rats a dreaded cannibal of twenty-one and a half inches—­joined in the mobbing, and soon the black rats found themselves in such a position that there was no escape—­no escape for any but a black rat.  For them there was one way.  And those two living electric sparks on four feet took it.  They went up the wall!

I don’t know, but I guess that, as the black rats’ upper jaws were longer and sharper and more shark-like than the brown rats’, and their tails very much longer, they got a spring off the tail—­and legs, too—­and had an agility in hanging on to knots and crannies above that possessed by the brown ghouls.  Be that as it may, they did it, and got a respite under the floor of the room above, before their enemies, traveling more normally, and by holes, could swarm up after them.

Then the two, cornered at last, with one last desperate rush, shot up through a hole in the boards, out into the middle of the room on the first floor, and stopped dead.

Ah! they stopped.  Good reason, too.  Good reason had the five brown rats, excited with blood-lust, hard on their tails, to stop also.

They found themselves suddenly revealed in the middle of a big room, furnished mainly with a few sacks, and flooded with a dazzling, blinding glare of electric light, that seemed brighter than the very sun.

There they were, all seven, black and brown, struck rigid, plain and clear for any to see.  And four men and two dogs stood there seeing them.  They, those men and dogs, had just come quietly for their evening rat-hunt, turning on the light suddenly, for the place was a mill as well as a farm, making—­from the mill-wheel—­its own electricity.

There was a strained, aching pause for about as long as a man takes to gasp.  Then the dogs sprang in, and one of the men jumped to the only hole in the room they had not previously stopped up.