The Stone Image | Page 2

The sentence ended in a wail, and, unlike Lot's wife, who turned back and congealed into salt crystal, my wife looked despairingly back at the shop we had just quit and nearly dissolved in salt water.
"Damn!" I muttered under my breath as a brightly painted woman cast a glance of commiseration at Betty, and her escort glared at me as if he would have liked to wring my neck. Aloud I said: "For the love of Michelangelo Casey, stop crying and we'll go back and get the awful thing; but if we go to the poorhouse trying to pay for it, Betty Haig, don't say I didn't give you fair warning."
Betty's tears evaporated before she could bring the absurd little dab of lace she calls her handkerchief into play. She pinioned my arm in both of hers and snuggled her cheek against my shoulder. "I just knew you'd buy it for me, Phil, old dear," she gurgled. Of course she did. The world's greatest clairvoyants could take lessons from Betty when it comes to reading my mind.
Between the living room and dining room of our house is a narrow, nondescript sort of room which the real-estate agent called a reception hall and Betty calls her fernery. In it she keeps a wide variety of potted ferns, palms, and flowering plants, over which a man can stumble and break a leg with the minimum expenditure of time and effort. From one end of this little room the stairs which lead to our sleeping apartments curve upward; at the other extremity is a small stained-glass window letting out of a little bay. Against this window Betty set up the petrified horror from the Orient, where its evil sneer greeted me each morning as I descended to breakfast and its misshapen shadow fell across me every evening as I went in to dinner.
For the first few days after the loathsome object was installed in its alcove I merely favored it with a disgusted frown as I passed; but my passive dislike hardened into an active detestation before it had been there three days.
It was Chang's encounter with the thing which made me realize how violent my hate for it was. Chang was Betty's Siamese cat, and a more courageous grimalkin never walked the back fence by moonlight or gave battle to a wandering cur. I have seen him take on two rivals for his ladylove's favor at once and put them both to ignominious flight; I have seen him charge full tilt against a bull terrier twice his weight and send him yelping off under a veritable barrage of saber-clawed blows and feline billingsgate; yet before the Eastern image all his valor melted into nothingness.
I had paused before the statue one morning to pay it my profane respects, when Chang, who was very fond of me, came marching from the dining room to take his usual morning's ear-rubbing constitutional around my ankles. Halfway round my legs he came face to face with the image's leering mask, and stopped dead still in his tracks.
The hairs of his tail and along his spine began to rise, his small ears flattened against his head, his mouth slowly opened in a noiseless "spit," and his legs bent under him till the white fur on his underside touched the floor. For a long moment he regarded the statue with the fierce, silent glare which only an angry cat can give; then from the nethermost pit of his stomach came a low, rumbling growl, the defiant war cry of a cat about to close with a stronger foe. Slowly, as if stalking a bird, he crept, belly low to earth, toward the image's base; then, with his black nose almost against the stone, he paused, looking up at its malignant face, and suddenly, as though shot from a crossbow, turned and bolted, yowling, up the stairs. I had never seen Chang turn tail on anything, living or dead, and the sight of his abject terror almost unnerved me. Why such a valiant warrior should fly from a piece of carved stone was more than I could understand. But Chang was wise; he, too, came from the East, and he knew.
Next morning we found Chang lying dead at the creature's stone feet, an ugly wound gaping from the blue-gray fur of his breast, and on the statue's twisted lips and on its gleaming ivory tusks was a dull, brick-red stain, the stain that drying blood leaves.
Betty wept inconsolably at the loss of her little pet, but she refused to blame the image for it. "Poor Chang hated it so he dashed himself against its face and was killed when he struck its teeth," she explained between sobs.
I picked up Chang's little corpse and stroked its stiff gray fur gently. "He