Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1894 — Miss Millar’s Pet. [ARTICLE]

Miss Millar’s Pet.

“Well, we’re off, Miss Millard. What shall I bring you—since you won’t have my heart?” lie added in a lower tone. With the eyes of the whole party upon her, she could only laugh and answer: “Bring me a baby tiger, Lieut. Nugent. They say they’re as tame and pretty as kittens, and I would like so unique a pet.” “Unique,” growled old Col. Price; “unique! And some day your pretty kitten will make a meal of you, and your friends will have to put the kitten in the coffin to be sure of interring you. Umpli!” “First catch your hire, you know,” put in a third flannel-shirted, top-booted individual, looking to the loading of his rifle. “It isn’t as easy as picking gooseberries, capturing a tiger cub. You are most likely to be a gooseberry yourself, or with the berry added later when the mother gets through paying her delicate attentions to your carcass.” “Oh, well if you are afraid, lieutenant,” pouted Miss Millard, turning her head away from the handsome eyes fixed upon her. The hot blood rose tc the young man’s cheek and his look of passionate admiration changed to one of pride and brightened to indignation. “You shall have the kitten, Miss Millard,” he said, quietly, “if there is one to be found,” and joined the party setting out for the jungle in search of big game. “How could you be so foolish, Imogen e ?” said Mrs. Price, lying back lazily in her hammock, shielded from the glare of the brazen Indian sky by a giant jujube tree, which also extended the shelter of its leaves to Imogene in her wicker chair. “Leonard Nugent is just the boy to risk his life to gratify your caprice.” “Oh, no, he isn’t, cousin Harriet; he’s too matter of fact, too much of himself to endunger even his comfort for me or any other woman,” answered the girl, carelessly stripping a long blade of grass between her white fingers. “Now, that is where you are mistaken, Imogene. Under Leonard's quiet, self-contained manner lie courage and devotion that would put to shame those.pink and white officers of the Fifteenth and Twenty-second that flutter about you.” “Well, I am too sleepy to argue it out with you,"returned Imogene,closing her blue eyes with a provoking droop of her pretty mouth. “ Yes, it is a female, sahib, and if I mistake not she has cubs, young ones. But to go in search of them along the nullah whence she came would be to run into the very jaws of death, for the male, missing her, will follow from the lair.” “ It’s all nonsense, anyhow, Nugent,” said the Colonel, gruffly, “to risk your life for a woman’s whim, and ten to one Imogene will have forgotten all about the thing before we ■even get home.” “ No matter; I am going to trace the way the tigress took to the drinking place, and secure the cub if lean. Will you come with mo? or, if you prefer going on, Mohammed Din here will he sufficient.” “Of course we are going with you if you persist,” returned Franklin, the third man, and the Colonel, shrugging his shoulders, left the coolies to carry homo the tigress which he had just shot, and plunged deeper into the jungle after Nugent and the old tiger hunter, who with Fran,:iin,were heating down the long grass before them. “We ruyst be near the place, sahib,” whispered Mahommed Din after several hours’ slow march along tiie banks of the little nullah, now dry. but covered with a wilderness of ■vegetation that tore at their garments, scratched their skin, and brought many muttered blessings from the Colonel. “I have found it er.sy to trail her to this point, but here she must have turned.” He bent to ■examine the bowed bush before him, •and as he did so a long body like a flash of yellow light launched itself through the air, only clearing his naked back by a few inches. It was the male, furious presumably at the absence of its mate and at the crying of its cubs, and, missing the native, Bung itself upon Nugent, who, surprised at the suddenness of the attack, was borne backward and to the earth with the tawny shape stretched ,*t full length upon him and feeling with its gaping mouth for his throat. A groan of horror broke from his friends, and the Colonel, throwing down his rifle, ran beside the two forms. But, though his right arm was pinned beneath by his own •weight and that of the tiger, Nugent managed to draw his revolver from his belt, and as the animal seized his arm in its mouth, pulled the trigger, and the shot went ploughing its way into the big cat’s brain. Niigent rose, dizzy and sick, when his friends had pulled the tiger’s body off him, • aud it was found that his right arm was broken, while the left was torn by the teeth that had closed upon it just as the animal died. But the young man did not forget wh&t had brought him hither, and at his bidding Mohammed Din began tc search the ground for some signs of fche lair where the cubs were hid■den. Freed now from the fears of the parents, the Colonel and Franklin joined in the hunt, while Nugent pursued the trail along the oallah to find, if possible, the water he was beginning to crave. All at once he ran into a mass of ruins where an ancient temple had onou stood

when this wilderness was once a peopled plain, and, seating himself upon the fallen lintel of a door, rested for a moment and as he did so there came creeping about his feet two pretty yellow striped kittens, rubbing themselves against his hoots, and purring aloud. But no domesticated pussy cat these, knowing nothing of cream, and fireside, but real children of the jungle with flame In their veins and eyes. The other hunters came running at Nugent’s call, and Mohammed Din begging one of the cubs, it was given him to sell to the Lnglish agent of a menagerie, while the other was tied and placed in a basket to be conferred on the young lady rash enough to covet him. “It is well,” said Mohammed Din, looking about him, “ that we killed the old tigress first, or we would have that on our track than which fire is no worse. But it may be that we have found the cubs of another pair, so let us haste.” “Oh, the darling!” cried Miss Imogene, as Nugent put the cub into her arms, and stroking the yellow body which flashed itself about and seized her hand in its mouth, but the teeth were yet only white pearls, and the claws only a cunning pretense of such, and so Miss Millard laughed and hugged her pet. “But you are wounded,” she said, looking ai her lover with her soft eyes pitiful with sympathy and her lips quivering as she gently touched the improintu bandages on his arm. As the Colonel broke out with the- story Nugent watched her face flush and pale alternately with admiration and terror for him, his soul was lifted up above the pain that he was suffering and which made the surgeon, Whitelaw, send him early to bed, whence he went to dream of his sweetheart. “ It shall sleep in my room, where I can feed it during the night if it is hungry,” said Imogene, tucking her “ kitten ” under her arm, and balancing a saucer of milk in the other hand. Mrs. Price followed her with her eyes faintly uneasy. “Hadn’t you better leave it with the servants, Imogene, for a few nights at least, until it gets accustomed to you ? ” she remonstrated, but the girl shook her wilful head. “No, we are going to be friends from the first, aren’t we, Kitty ?” she answered, speaking to tho soft, tawny ball nestling to her, and proceeding to make the little animal comfortable in a box lined with cotton, taking at the same time precaution to secure it by placing a top of slats across the bed. How lor.g the girl slept she did not know, but she opened her eyes just in time to see a large object obscure the light which the full moon was pouring in at her window, which had been left open to allow what faint air might be stirring to enter. The next moment this object advanced to a long bulk, lighted by a pair of gleaming orbs that burned like live coals in the semi-gloom, and this shape of dread leaped agilely into the room. Imogene held her breath, with a sickening sense of physical terror on her, watching with fascinated, diluted eyes the form pacing tho apartment with long, restless steps. Once it stopped and snuffed at the box wherein the cub lay, and the little creature wakening, hailed it with welcoming cry.

Then began a struggle on the part of the mother and the confined cub for the latter’s liberty, but the box, a stout one, and weighted down by the cover, at which the tigress could only claw frantically, not lift, held firm, and the watcher from the bed ! shivered as she saw the tigress, growing more and more furious as she was baffled, swing her long tail from side to side, and, turning her glowing eyes upon the captor of her cub, leap towards her. Scarcely conscious of what glie was doing, hut obeying that instinct of preservation we all know, she flung herself out of the bed between the piece of furniture and the wall, and with inspired strength pushed the heavy article far enough to permit of her body slipping down to the floor. The tigress fell on tho spot which she had just vacated with a low growl of fury, and she could hear the terrible claws as they tore the clothing of the bed to slireds, as the animal, finding her gone, still scented her recent presonce. The girl tried to scream for help, but there seemed a band of iron around her throat, and she could only whisper out an appeal for her friends sleeping only a few yards from her, but as unconscious of her peril as if a thousand miles away. Fortunately the bed was of English manufacture, and 'reached within a foot and a half of the floor, just admitting of her lying beneath it, and as the tigress, finding that her foe had not disappeared into the mattress, gave it up and began to sniff about the room in search of the missing enemy, and approaching the bed again, and discovering the trembling girl beneath, attempted to crawl under, she found that this was not to be done. Crouching, then, close to the floor, she ran her long arms under the bed in the endeavor to draw the victim out from her hiding place. Repeatedly the claws would catch portions of the girl’s dress and the cloth would yield and rend from tho sharp touch, and Imogene would clasp her hands tightly about the legs of the bed to keep from being drawn forth. Once she received a terrible scratch from one of the greedy paws on her arm, and was obliged to tear her dress for a bandage with which to bind the artery, which came so near being severed. The smell of this blood seemed- to render the tigress furious, and she again and again would fling herself upon the bed, until the girl under it feared that the animal would bring the whole structure down upon her, when she would die of suffocation. At this point she was seized with an insane desire to laugh, and lay for minutes shaking with a ghastly sort of merriment, which she was only able to control by thinking, “Am I going mad?” and a vision of her friends coming in the morning to find her raving or imbecile, even if in her lunacy she did not rise and venture out into the room. Leonard Nugent awoke from a dream in which a tiger seated, in a priest’s garments, on the steps of a temple engaged in performing the marriage ceremony of himself and Imogene, was mingled with a vision

of seeing the walls of the Price bungalow falling down, and lay for a moment or two trying to resume his slumbers when lie became conscious that there was something shaking the house. He sat up, wondering if an earthquake could be producing the trembling, but presently the sound of a low, unnatural laugh in a woman’s voice broke on his ear. Springing from his bed he dressed himself hastily, listening as he did so for any further intimation of what was going on, and then as the growl of a tiger like the rumble of faint thunder reached him lie caught up his rifle and pistol, and ran out of his room. Whence had corpe the noise? From Imogene’s apartment, which was next his own? As he flew to tiie door behind which his beloved lay in danger lie struck his host’s with a loud fist, crying to him to arm himself and to follow. “What? What?” cried the Colonel after him, but there was no reply, for after a cry to Imogene to know how things were with her, and receiving no reply, Nugent put his shoulder to the door and broke it in. There was a sudden spring at him, a howl of a captive wild creature, and tlic report of a gun. The tigress fell wounded unto death, but still able to roll towards her foe, snarling and game to the last. With one mighty failing effort she reared upon her bind limbs and would have leaped at his throat, but pistol in hand, Nugent discharged the weapon in her face and she fell backward, when he finished her by a ball through the has e of her skull. But where is Imogene ? A hasty search failed to reveal her mangled body, as her lover, sick at heart, feared to come upon, but no answer came to his agonized calls for her and the mystery grew profound until Mrs. Price, wise in her knowledge of her sex, suggested from the door: “ Look under the bed,” and the next moment Nugent, for all his wounded left arm, which was all he had at his service, the right being still in the sling, had dragged the bed from the wall and caught his unconscious sweetheart to his breast. When she opened her eyes Mrs. Price slipped away and dragged with her tho Colonel, who had arrived on the scene sputtering sleepily: “What is It ? What is it? Can’t anybody answer?” and to utter a shrill shriek as he stumbled over the dead tigress, and there in the dark Imogene gave her lover the answer he wanted, and I've heard her say since that he could do a great deal of execution with one arm. The cub was shot the next day, and the Colonel glanced slyly at Imogene and said: “Well, Imogene, you don’t fancy a tiger kitten as much as you did, eh?” But Nugent, pressing her hand, whispered: “Of course, I’m sorry, darling, that you had the fright, but I’ll thank the cub all my life,” and to-day that little animal stuffed, occupies a prominent position in their drawing-room,while Mrs. Nugent tells the story with great pride. [Toledo Blade.