ice had so cried out.

All of which the gutter-cat did, despite the positive evidence of her
senses that this human noise had proceeded from the white bird itself on
the window-sill.

The bottle fly bumped once again against its invisible prison wall in the
silence that ensued. The gutter-cat prepared and sprang with sudden
decision, landing where Cocky had perched the fraction of a second
before. Cocky had darted to the side, but, even as he darted, and as the
cat landed on the sill, the cat's paw flashed out sidewise and Cocky
leaped straight up, beating the air with his wings so little used to
flying. The gutter-cat reared on her hind-legs, smote upward with one
paw as a child might strike with its hat at a butterfly. But there was
weight in the cat's paw, and the claws of it were outspread like so many
hooks.

Struck in mid-air, a trifle of a flying machine, all its delicate gears
tangled and disrupted, Cocky fell to the floor in a shower of white
feathers, which, like snowflakes, eddied slowly down after, and after the
plummet-like descent of the cat, so that some of them came to rest on her
back, startling her tense nerves with their gentle impact and making her
crouch closer while she shot a swift glance around and overhead for any
danger that might threaten.

CHAPTER XXI

Harry Del Mar found only a few white feathers on the floor of Dag
Daughtry's room in the Bowhead Lodging House, and from the landlady
learned what had happened to Michael. The first thing Harry Del Mar did,
still retaining his taxi, was to locate the residence of Doctor Emory and
make sure that Michael was confined in an outhouse in the back yard. Next
he engaged passage on the steamship _Umatilla_, sailing for Seattle and
Puget Sound ports at daylight. And next he packed his luggage and paid
his bills.

In the meantime, a wordy war was occurring in Walter Merritt Emory's
office.

"The man's yelling his head off," Doctor Masters was contending. "The
police had to rap him with their clubs in the ambulance. He was violent.
He wanted his dog. It can't be done. It's too raw. You can't steal his
dog this way. He'll make a howl in the papers."

"Huh!" quoth Walter Merritt Emory. "I'd like to see a reporter with
backbone enough to go within talking distance of a leper in the
pest-house. And I'd like to see the editor who wouldn't send a
pest-house letter (granting it'd been smuggled past the guards) out to be
burned t