d ramparts, and wings--the wings of
fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed--"spoke" like swords
through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven.

The night-folk began to move abroad. You could hear them pass--now a
faint rustle here, now a surreptitious "pad-pad" there. Once some
bird-thing of the night cried out suddenly, very far away in the sky,
"Keck! keck!" and was gone.

It was not Pharaoh, however, that you would have heard move. None of
the wild-folk could tell how at midnight he managed to land himself far
out over the marsh, unperceived. He was there--you must take my word
for it--just two faintly luminous yellow-green lamps floating on the
mist.

Not many men knew their way across the marsh by day; certainly not five
even of the oldest wildfowlers could have got over safely by night. It
was not man, therefore, that was causing the cat to melt into the
short, salt grass, so closely that there was nothing of him left.
Something else was coming his way.

Along the edge of the dike it came--tall, thin, pale, ghostly,
and--yes, I could have sworn it, though night does play odd tricks with
the human eyesight--faintly phosphorescent. At least, it seemed to
glow ever so dimly, like one that moves in a nearly burnt-out halo.

Every yard or two it paused, that thing. Once there was a splash, as
if some one were spearing fish and had missed.

The cat moved rather less than an average stone. He knew that in the
wild to be motionless is, in nine cases out of ten, to be invisible.
The tenth case doesn't matter, because the creature that discovers it
usually dies. Moreover, there was no cover to move to, and cover is
the cat's trump card.

Now, everything would have gone off all right if--well, if the cat
hadn't been a cat, I suppose; that is, if he had been able to stop the
ceaseless twitching of the black tip of his tail. Tiger-hunters know
that twitching, and those who have stalked the lion will tell you of
it, as also the sparrow on the garden wall, whose life may have been
saved from somebody's pet "tabby" by that same twitching. It is a
characteristic habit of the tribe, I take it.

The luminous ghost-thing was close now. Heaven knows whether it saw
that twitching then! I think so. It stopped, anyway, and became a
pillar of stone. The cat, almost under it, fairly pressed himself into
the grass.

Then--whrrp!

Something shot through the air like a lance, and pinned that twit