The keeper searched that cottage from chimney to doorstep.  No cat there.  His dog did not, as might have been expected, help him in this search.  Indeed, his dog, he now discovered, had vanished—­had, in fact, gone out at the back-door and cleared off.

Meanwhile the cat was, for his sins, being horribly pricked by the holly-hedge through which he was sliding.  He growled under the punishment.  Ordinary domestic cats do not, as a rule, growl in such cases, though they may “swear.”

Once through the hedge, the cat dropped into the ditch on the other side, turned to his right, and galloped up it.  It ran upwards, skirting a sloping wet field, to a dark, damp, black wood, as woods always are that stand on cold clay and have much evergreen growth.  They remind one of a wet, chill rhododendron forest of Tibet.

The cat’s gallop was in itself peculiar, loose, long, his head low, his forepaws straight, his hindlegs trailing out behind.  So does the tiger gallop across the jungle glade when the beaters rouse him.

There were other things peculiar about Pharaoh also, now that one had him on the move and could see.  He was, perhaps, a fraction big for his kind; his coat was yellowish, fading beneath, with “faint pale stripes” well marked on the sides; his tail was long, and oddly slender and “whippy,” ringed faintly to the black tip; his fur was short and harsh, quite unlike that of a domestic cat, and the expression of his eyes was one of permanent, unsleeping fierceness.

Once he stopped and stared back, and in the pause which followed one could distinctly hear a faint but rapidly increasing drumming sound following his trail up the ditch.  And least of all beasts had that cat delusions.  He turned and galloped on.  The keeper’s dog was of an independent turn of mind.  He had quietly run that cat’s trail, forgetting that, in the long-run, dogs are not fitted to maneuver independently, and may suffer if they do so.  You see him flying up the trail, square nose to ground, tracking really very cleverly indeed, and with a fine amount of what huntsmen call “drive.”

Ho had overtaken Pharaoh before the hunted one could reach the wood.  He realized it as he took the last bend in the ditch, when he saw a yellow streak rise under his nose, and bound, with all four legs stuck out quite straight, and claws spread abroad, like a rubber ball out of his path, avoiding his clumsy, murderous snap by an inch, and then felt it rebound right on to his back.

The next few seconds were quite crowded, and that dog had the time of his life.

Even an ordinary domestic “puss” can make wonderful havoc of a dog’s back when once it gets there; and stays, as it does, like a burr, and this one could go a bit better than most; and when that dog at last got the cat’s “leave to go,” he went rather sooner than at once, proclaiming his misery aloud to all the world, so that his master, coming at that moment out of the back-door of the cottage, heard him afar off, and swore.