Page:Under the Sun.djvu/241

Rh for it is one of the virtues of thought that it should be rapid, and one of the essentials in a hypothesis that it should be simple. Mr. Cartwright's mind must have flashed to its decision on the instant, and the only hypothesis that could possibly have covered all the suspicious circumstances — the hour of his capture, the position on the roof of an outbuilding, the headlong scramble over adjoining premises — was at once off his tongue. He was looking for a cat.

What more natural, he would ask, than that puss should have gone out at night, should have been on the roof of an out-building, and should have tried to elude capture by hasty flight over other roofs? Mr. Cartwright, no doubt, was much attached to his little friend — I can hardly call a cat a dumb companion — and having missed it from the hearth, braved the discomforts of the night air by going forth to seek it in its favorite haunts, which with cats are always a neighbor's premises. Failing to see it at the first cursory glance, he determined to go farther, but apprehending resistance from the cat, he armed himself with an iron bar which a neighboring rag-dealer used for securing a side-door, and, the door happening to open, Mr. Cartwright, naturally enough, went into the house to look for his pet. In his pathetic anxiety he searched every place, whether probable or improbable — and eventually the till.

The sight of the money in it probably suggested to him the feasibility of bribing the cat to return, and he took sufficient for the purpose — twenty-six shillings — and in his then forlorn and disconsolate condition the mourning ring naturally occurred to him as an appropriate and becoming possession. Had he found the cat