A Night Out | Page 5

traits besides his yearning for
debauchery and "frawgs"; so now he squared himself and uncurled his

velvet toes.
Ash-Can Sam crouched low and came in with a headlong rush. Omar
Ben side-stepped and raked him with a stiffly extended paw. It was a
good rake, and there was fur upon his claws--and blood.
"Hully gee!" breathed Pete into Mame's convenient ear. "Did yer pipe
de way bo upper-cut 'im? Gee!"
Ash-Can Sam was wounded--not so much in body as in pugilistic pride.
He turned to wipe away the stain, and, incidentally, to wipe the earth
with the body of a foreign cat. This time he came in, swearing, and the
two cats reared upon their haunches with the shock; then fell in a
tangled, rending, yowling snarl. Omar Ben, by instinctive craft, sought
for a point of vantage underneath his foe--a vantage because, when
lying on his back, he could claw straight up with all four feet, and the
greater the weight of the chap on top, the greater his woe--abdominally.
This point of vantage, however, is rather difficult to hold, with two
most earnest gentlemen desirous of it; and so they changed
positions--changed so rapidly, in fact, that their bodies resembled a sort
of pyrotechnic pinwheel whose centrifugal sparks were composed of
eyes and claws and tufts of fur and cat profanity. Also, it lasted longer
than the ordinary pinwheel, and was a trifle more uproarious; but it
died at last with a sizzling spit, and a lean black streak shot out toward
the haven of an alley's mouth.
The streak was Ash-Can Sam. Omar Ben Sufi sat down in the middle
of the street, and wondered. He had thrashed something, and he didn't
understand it. So he just sat there, quivering, bleeding, battered--but a
conqueror.
Ringtail Pete endeavored to express himself, but emotion choked him;
therefore he spat fervidly and said:
"Hully gee!"
Then he and the ladies descended from the roof, to walk in silent circles

around the champion, regarding him with a species of cataleptic awe.
Presently, however, Pete came to earth, extended his paw, and
delivered himself of an established truth:
"Well, dang my hide, but it takes er 'ristercrat fer to glitter in a scrap!"
They escorted him all the way to his eighty-thousand-dollar home. The
ladies kissed him--both of them--and helped him to clamber weakly
over his garden wall.
He turned to Ringtail with an easy, aristocratic smile: "Au revoir, R.T.!
Those frawgs were most delicious!"
"Hully gee!" breathed Pete, and disappeared through the dusk of the
outer world.

III
Now, in the eighty-thousand-dollar cottage black sorrow reigned
throughout the night. There were tears and linguistic prayers. There
were tinklings of little bells, while humans called shrilly to vulgar
officials along the wires. From a mass of incoherence the officials
learned that some evil-hearted ruffian had entered the
thirty-thousand-dollar garden and had stolen a priceless cat.
Thus the outer world went hunting. So great was its zeal--so great was
the offer of reward--that it captured every cat in town, with the one
exception, of course, of Omar Ben Sufi. This particular hero was found
next morning, asleep, in the geranium-bed; so they bore him in, while
weepings burst forth afresh. And well they might.
Poor Omar Ben was a sight to awaken pity, even in the stoniest of
hearts. The number of his hairs could be counted, almost, by plus and
minus tufts; one eye was closed; his splendid tail was bent in several
angles unrecognized by the rules of art, and he smelled of the outer
world--horribly.

His mistress expressed her grief in a noiseless, refined whimper of
despair; the French maid shrieked, and called on Heaven to witness the
devastation of her every hope; but the master--who had lived, in spite
of his Wall Street training--laughed.
"Nonsense!" said he. "You are squandering your sympathies upon a
shameless prodigal. The beast has had the time of his life, by George!"
"Oh, Charles, how can you?" wailed the mistress of the priceless cat.
"Can't you see how the precious child is suffering?"
Again the master laughed--laughed brutally.
"Of course he's suffering, my dear--but look at the smile on him!"

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