Page:The Book of Cats.djvu/72

52 In the morning the gamekeeper had released the poor exhausted creature for the dogs to worry out what little life was left in its body. The head dried by the heat of two summers, the wrinkled forehead, the expanded eyelids, the glary eyeballs, the whiskers stretched to their full extent, the spiteful lips, exposing the double row of tiger-like teeth, envenomed by agony, told all this. The hand of death had not been powerful enough to relax the muscles racked for so many hours of pain and terror.

Another Cat's head wore a very different expression; she had neither been worried nor tortured. Creeping, stealthily, on the tips of her beautifully padded feet, behind some overhanging hedge, the hidden gamekeeper had suddenly shot her dead. In death her face was calm; no expression of fear ruffled her features; she had been shot down and died instantly at the moment of anticipated triumph.

A third head belonged to a poor little Puss that had died before it had attained the age of cathood; her young life had been knocked out of her with a stick: her head still retained the kitten's playful look, and there was an appealing expression about it as though it had died quickly, wondering in what it had done wrong.