All of which the gutter-cat did, despite the positive evidence of her senses that this human noise had proceeded from the white bird itself on the window-sill.

The bottle fly bumped once again against its invisible prison wall in the silence that ensued.  The gutter-cat prepared and sprang with sudden decision, landing where Cocky had perched the fraction of a second before.  Cocky had darted to the side, but, even as he darted, and as the cat landed on the sill, the cat’s paw flashed out sidewise and Cocky leaped straight up, beating the air with his wings so little used to flying.  The gutter-cat reared on her hind-legs, smote upward with one paw as a child might strike with its hat at a butterfly.  But there was weight in the cat’s paw, and the claws of it were outspread like so many hooks.

Struck in mid-air, a trifle of a flying machine, all its delicate gears tangled and disrupted, Cocky fell to the floor in a shower of white feathers, which, like snowflakes, eddied slowly down after, and after the plummet-like descent of the cat, so that some of them came to rest on her back, startling her tense nerves with their gentle impact and making her crouch closer while she shot a swift glance around and overhead for any danger that might threaten.

CHAPTER XXI

Harry Del Mar found only a few white feathers on the floor of Dag Daughtry’s room in the Bowhead Lodging House, and from the landlady learned what had happened to Michael.  The first thing Harry Del Mar did, still retaining his taxi, was to locate the residence of Doctor Emory and make sure that Michael was confined in an outhouse in the back yard.  Next he engaged passage on the steamship Umatilla, sailing for Seattle and Puget Sound ports at daylight.  And next he packed his luggage and paid his bills.

In the meantime, a wordy war was occurring in Walter Merritt Emory’s office.

“The man’s yelling his head off,” Doctor Masters was contending.  “The police had to rap him with their clubs in the ambulance.  He was violent.  He wanted his dog.  It can’t be done.  It’s too raw.  You can’t steal his dog this way.  He’ll make a howl in the papers.”

“Huh!” quoth Walter Merritt Emory.  “I’d like to see a reporter with backbone enough to go within talking distance of a leper in the pest-house.  And I’d like to see the editor who wouldn’t send a pest-house letter (granting it’d been smuggled past the guards) out to be burned the very second he became aware of its source.  Don’t you worry, Doc.  There won’t be any noise in the papers.”

“But leprosy!  Public health!  The dog has been exposed to his master.  The dog itself is a peripatetic source of infection.”

“Contagion is the better and more technical word, Doc.,” Walter Merritt Emory soothed with the sting of superior knowledge.

“Contagion, then,” Doctor Masters took him up.  “The public must be considered.  It must not run the risk of being infected—­”