gger and had stabbed them, and vanished into hiding
before the sound had ceased, almost. They knew that shadow--the owner of
the whistle; they had met her earlier that night--the giant eagle-owl.
But what the fangs and claws was she doing here? After rats, perhaps.
They hoped so, and tried to think she was not after them.

The people who are condemned to live in those parts know that deaths,
many and mysterious, go about there in the night, seeking victims, and
that fowls must, in consequence, be well penned. Yet they die; and it
has been said that where a snake can squeeze into a fowl-house, there a
genet can follow--perhaps dealing with the snake first, and the fowls
afterwards. Certainly, there seems to be no longer, and narrower, and
lower, and more sinuous little beast on this earth than the genet.

The male genet took the problem upon himself as his own special province
to find entrance into places; and the female, her suspicions of him
oozing away more and more every minute, "kept cave." And he found an
entrance, that little, long, low beggar; he found an entrance, a hole up
under the roof, that appeared small enough, in all conscience, to be
overlooked by anybody.

The moon knows how they climbed to it--I don't. And as the male genet
dropped down inside, the female took his place. But even as he landed he
wished he had not. Fear was there before him.

In the smelly, stifling, heated pitch-darkness a fowl squawked with pain,
and others burst into noise above his head.

Then he made a blunder. Surprised certainly, and angry perhaps, he
growled.

Instantly the confusion ceased and hushed to silence; and instantly, too,
round, large, amber-gold balls of light like lamps, to the number of two,
were switched on--fixed upon him, staring, so that he "froze" in his
tracks where he stood, and her crest stood up on the female genet, as it
does on a cat, as she peered through the hole. They had disturbed
something at its killing.

Very few graven images move less than those two pretty but small hunters
did in the nest half-minute, while the fowls settled down again, and the
genets tried--mainly with their noses--to find out what, in the
wilderness or out of it, they had run up against this time.

At the end of that period there fell upon their stupefied ears the sound
as if some one unseen were cracking nuts--nut after nut, very quickly--in
the blackness, and both genets very nearly had a fit--a motionless