g, his head low, his
forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind. So does the tiger
gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.

There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had
him on the move and could see. He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his
kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with "faint pale stripes"
well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and
"whippy," ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh,
quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was
one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.

Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one
could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound
following his trail up the ditch. And least of all beasts had that cat
delusions. He turned and galloped on. The keeper's dog was of an
independent turn of mind. He had quietly run that cat's trail,
forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver
independently, and may suffer if they do so. You see him flying up the
trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and
with a fine amount of what huntsmen call "drive."

Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood.
He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a
yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck
out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of
his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt
it rebound right on to his back.

The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of
his life.

Even an ordinary domestic "puss" can make wonderful havoc of a dog's
back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and
this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got
the cat's "leave to go," he went rather sooner than at once,
proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master,
coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him
afar off, and swore.

As for the cat, he turned about, all bristling, and went too. He went
straight up to, and through, the wood, disturbing in clouds the
starlings, who had just come in to roost in the rhododendrons, so that
they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on
forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a delug