ight and left, with the terrible,
rending, full stroke of his kind. He met open jaws with open jaws--you
could hear fang clash against fang. He grabbed, scrunched, drew back,
grabbed, scrunched again, as a lion will--for the cats neither hold
fast like a weasel nor snap like a wolf. Then, as the full force of
the charge and the weight of the enemy's body--some twenty-seven and a
half pounds--took him, he hugged, round-arm fashion, with his talons,
and, still grabbing and scrunching, rolled over backwards.

Cat and badger turned into a ball--a parti-colored ball, very lively as
to its center, and it whirled. Unfortunately there was not much room
to whirl in. That made things all the more grisly. You could almost
see the grim skeleton shape of death, hovering over that growling,
snarling, spitting, worrying, tearing, kicking, gnashing, scrunching,
foaming, blood-flecked Catherine-wheel--almost see death, I say,
bending down with upraised arm ready to strike. But death never struck.

In an instant there came, sounding strangely hollow in that still, damp
air of dusk, as though it were in a cave, the unmistakable noise of a
deep, dry, hacking cough. Truly, it was nothing much--just a good old
churchy and human cough. But it might have been a blast from the
trumpet of the archangel Gabriel himself by the effect it had upon the
two combatants. They shot apart like released electrified dust-atoms,
and--pff!--they were gone--wiped out. Like pricked bubbles, they had
ceased to be. And neither gave any explanation. Being wild things, of
course they wouldn't.

The cough had only come from a laborer, who, passing along a pathway
through the furze, had heard the commotion, and stopped. He never saw
anything, though he crashed into the furze and hunted--he never saw
anything, which was no wonder, seeing that he could hardly have
selected a way to see less. The cat was four hundred yards away by
that time, and goodness knows where the badger was---deep down in his
den, one presumes.

Later the cat slept, in a fortress of nature safe enough, surrounded by
a hundred unseen sentries with brown jackets and white tails--rabbits,
who would give him all the warning he required.

II

The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost
imperceptibly. Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last
glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of
an owl slid low over the spike