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Updated: May 15, 2025
And at last, when the rats gave them up as a very bad job, they went away together, and that's all there is to say. Together clinches it, you understand. Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a cottage of four rooms. He "did" for himself. Every housekeeper will know what "did" for himself means. But he did for himself in another way also. He came to read up for an exam.
A lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley, I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might be following up behind. Straight through the wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy.
Then the creaking sound as of the lid of a wicker basket being opened. The purring ceased. The creaking came again, as if the lid were being shut. There came the crunch once more of stealthy shod feet on gravel, the click of the gate, and silence! Hawkley had come for, and found, his cat.
He left it at home in the cottage which shows that he must have been badly scared, for such a cat must have been worth a lot to a collector's agent, such as Hawkley was. But perhaps he left it by way of revenge. I do not know. Anyway, there it was in his cottage, asleep on the sofa before the fire just as Hawkley, at the invitation of the authorities, had left it that morning.
Hawkley had a white, clean-shaven face, and big eyes the eyes that an animal may love and trust. Possibly the cat knew even the profession of him who came that way so softly and alone in the still afternoon. Anyway, he acted as if he did. Like a snake, and with rather less noise, Pharaoh slid off the sofa and to the door leading into the scullery.
He went more quickly than was expected, because the police got a telephone message from the police of another district several other districts, I think to say that he was "wanted" for precisely the same game there: and Hawkley must have expected this, for he walked out of the court with a grin on his face, and was no more seen. So quickly did he go that he had no time to take the cat.
The cat the pupils of his eyes like vertical slits in green-yellow stone gave one quick look at, and through, the open window. He had the impression, framed in the window, of a bobbing, black, "square" bowler hat not often seen these days and a red face with small eyes, and a sticking-out beard of aggressiveness. This was no Hawkley. The cat knew it, as he knew, probably, the alien tread.
Hawkley had, in fact, ruined the sanctuary, and taken or slain pretty well every other bird worth having in the place, so that five years would not make good the harm he had done. Moreover, it was shown in the evidence that Hawkley had been able to accomplish his work by aid of a folding pocket-rifle with a silencer on, and his cat especially the cat, whose name was Pharaoh.
No words of the keeper's could be found sufficiently to revile that cat. Indeed, the head-keeper went speechless, and nearly had epilepsy, in trying to describe it to the Court, and if it had done only one-half the things that the keeper asserted, it must have been a very remarkable beast indeed; the magistrate said so. In consequence Hawkley got rather heavily fined, and went.
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