cked
up, and of the winged words the colonel had used to the head-keeper; of
the traps set all about, of the gins doubled and trebled in the wood
and round the park, and of the under-keepers who, with guns and
tempting baits, took up their positions to wait for him as night fell.

No one seemed to have suspected the furze a mile away, and still less
the marsh and the coverless bleak shore of the estuary, as his home.
Indeed, no one looks for a cat on a wind-whipped marsh when woods are
near at all. Yet this open, wet country seemed to be a peculiarly
favorite hunting-ground of Pharaoh's.

It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh,
wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern,
in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the
piebald shadows. Possibly the cat's whiskers first hinted at some new
presence by reason of the "ancient and fish-like smell" which pervaded
this precise reed jungle.

Pharaoh stopped dead. Pharaoh, with cruel, thin ears pressed back,
sank like a wraith into the soft ground. Pharaoh ceased to be even a
grayish-yellow, smoky something, and became nothing but eyes--eyes
floating and wicked. A domestic cat, after one frozen interval, would
have crept away from the foe it could not fathom, but Pharaoh had other
blood in his veins.

To begin with, he was wondering what manner of beast the owner of those
saurian-like orbs might be. To go on with, he was hungry, and--smelt
fish. But though he was looking full at the big bird, he could not see
it, which is the bittern's own private little bit of magic.

Nature has given him a coat just like a bunch of dried reeds and the
shadows between, and he does the rest by standing with his bead stuck
straight up and as still as a brass idol. Result--invisibility.

None know how long those two sought to "outfreeze" the "freezer," while
the rain-showers came up and passed hissing, and the moon played at
hide-and-seek. None knew when Pharaoh, flat as a snake, first began
that deadly, silent circling, which was but acting in miniature the
ways of the lion. None knew, either, at what point of bittern first
begun to sink and sink, till he crouched, and puffed, his neck curved
on his back like a spring ready set, his beak, like a sharpened
assegai, upright.

Only the short-eared owl, with his wonderful eyes, beheld Pharaoh make
his final rush; watched that living spring _sprung_ quick as light