eover,
it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish
his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his
cat--especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.

No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that
cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy,
in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half
the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very
remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence
Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went. He went more quickly than
was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the
police of another district--several other districts, I think--to say
that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley
must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on
his face, and was no more seen.

So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat. He left it
at home in the cottage--which shows that he must have been badly
scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's
agent, such as Hawkley was. But perhaps he left it by way of revenge.
I do not know. Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa
before the fire--just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities,
had left it that morning.

It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when the cat, Pharaoh, woke
up, and transformed himself instantly from deep sleep to strained
alertness, in that way which is peculiar to the children of the wild,
but has been lost by their domestic degenerates. The sun was shining
full in at the little diamond-paned window. The window was open, and a
late fly of metallic hue was shooting about with a pinging noise, like
the twang of some instrumental string. But neither fly, nor sun, nor
the tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece had awakened the cat.
It was the click of the little front-gate latch.

The cat--the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow
stone--gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had
the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square"
bowler hat--not often seen these days--and a red face with small eyes,
and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. The
cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread. Hawkley had a
white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes--the eyes that an animal may
love and