Page:The red book of animal stories.djvu/153

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE STORY OF JACKO II.
131

evening and was now quite wide awake. The result was that, at the end of twenty minutes, Tony bounded out of bed once more; but this time it was neither halberd nor pistol which he took in hand, but a whip.

Jacko saw him coming, and tried to hide in a corner, but it was too late, and Tony administered a well-deserved castigation. This effectually quieted the culprit for the rest of the night; but now Tony found it impossible to go to sleep again, so he got up, lit his lamp, and as he could not paint by its light, sat down to work at one of the wood engravings which made him the king of illustrators of his day.

He felt much puzzled all the morning as to the best way of combining peace at night with economy in fuel, and he was still turning the matter over in his mind when a pretty cat called 'Michette' walked into the studio.

Jacko was very fond of Michette because she did whatever he wished, and Michette on her side was devoted to Jacko. Tony, remembering their mutual attachment, determined to make the most of it. This cat, with her thick winter coat of fur, would be as good as any stove.

So he picked her up, and putting her into Jacko's hutch, pushed him in after her, shut down the grating, and went back to the studio to watch through a little hole how things went on.

At first the prisoners tried hard, each after its own fashion, to get out. Jacko leapt against each of the three walls, and then fell to shaking the bars of the grating, regardless of the fact that his efforts were quite in vain.

As for Michette, she lay where she had been placed, and looked all round without moving more than her head; then going to the bars she rubbed first one side and then the other against them, rounding her back and arching her tail, and mewing loudly. Then she tried to push her head between the bars, but, finding all of no avail, she made herself a nest in one corner of the hutch, and curled