ter-cat whose head had
erupted into the crack like an apparition.

Alert, dilating and contracting, as swift as cautious, and infinitely
apprehensive, the pupils vertically slitted in jet into the midmost of
amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alighted
on Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed that the cat had stiffened,
crouched, and frozen. Almost imperceptibly the eyes settled into a
watching that was like to the stony stare of a sphinx across aching and
eternal desert sands. The eyes were as if they had so stared for
centuries and millenniums.

No less frozen was Cocky. He drew no film across his one eye that showed
his head cocked sideways, nor did the passion of apprehension that
whelmed him manifest itself in the quiver of a single feather. Both
creatures were petrified into the mutual stare that is of the hunter and
the hunted, the preyer and the prey, the meat-eater and the meat.

It was a matter of long minutes, that stare, until the head in the
doorway, with a slight turn, disappeared. Could a bird sigh, Cocky would
have sighed. But he made no movement as he listened to the slow,
dragging steps of a man go by and fade away down the hall.

Several minutes passed, and, just as abruptly the apparition
reappeared--not alone the head this time, but the entire sinuous form as
it glided into the room and came to rest in the middle of the floor. The
eyes brooded on Cocky, and the entire body was still save for the long
tail, which lashed from one side to the other and back again in an
abrupt, angry, but monotonous manner.

Never removing its eyes from Cocky, the cat advanced slowly until it
paused not six feet away. Only the tail lashed back and forth, and only
the eyes gleamed like jewels in the full light of the window they faced,
the vertical pupils contracting to scarcely perceptible black slits.

And Cocky, who could not know death with the clearness of concept of a
human, nevertheless was not altogether unaware that the end of all things
was terribly impending. As he watched the cat deliberately crouch for
the spring, Cocky, gallant mote of life that he was, betrayed his one and
forgivable panic.

"Cocky! Cocky!" he called plaintively to the blind, insensate walls.

It was his call to all the world, and all powers and things and
two-legged men-creatures, and Steward in particular, and Kwaque, and
Michael. The burden of his call was: "It is I, Cocky. I am very small