After a last careful survey of the box Thragun jumped to the floor and padded purposefully to the door. It was close to tea time, he knew, when these who rightly valued him provided excellent food on his own dish. His tongue curved over his lips and he paused for a moment by the half opened door of the drawing room, scenting the feast waiting within. However, there was a time for one's taking one's ease and enjoying one's rightful food, and there was a time when duty called elsewhere.
Thragun walked on firmly and then, possessed by the need to do something needful, he flashed down the hall. Hastings was coming with a tray, Jennie holding open the door for him. It was easy enough to slip through and get down to the kitchen.
The smells wafted from well-filled tea stands were as nothing compared with the fragrance here. Cook was working at dinner already. As she moved ponderously from table to stove, she caught sight of Thragun.
"Got a bit o' what's right for th' likes of you, my fine gentleman. Give yourself a taste of this 'ere. 'Twill only be a foretaste-but Christmas if a-comin' an' you won't be sayin' no to a bite or two of goose then. We have 'im already a-hangin' in the larder."
She dipped something out of a large pan into a bowl.
"Now then, you'll be a-takin' that outside of 'ere-I got me too much to do to go dodgin' you this hour."
She carried the bowl to a second door and set it on the floor, closing the door behind her.
Thragun considered a new problem now. The creature whose help might be well needed had first appeared on a flight of stairs not too far away. There was no way for a cat to transfer this treat to that place. Very delicately he pushed at the bowl and it scraped across the stone flooring. It took three more efforts to get it to the top of the stairs, but there was no way of taking it down. He sat down, eyes half closed to consider the point.
There were no secrets in Hob's Green which were unknown to Thragun by now. He always began the night curled up by Emmy. But if she chose to sleep away the more interesting hours, he did not. When the house was quiet, he would go prowling on his own. He had met Hob when Mrs. Cobb, the cook, had set out a bowl of cream to entice the house luck. That had been several months ago when there had been need of all the help one could summon. When another sort of Khon had commanded ill services in this house.
He and Hob had come to an agreement then and had acted together to dispose of she-who-was-black-of-thought. Thragun's lips drew back a little and his fangs showed. Yes, he and Hob had done together what must be done, and most efficiently also.
Since then he had seen Hob once or twice on his midnight trips of discovery. Whether Mrs. Cobb did or did not believe that the fortunate fall of Miss Wyker down the staircase had anything to do with Hob or not, she had since left out a bowl of cream each Saturday night and that was always drained dry in the morning.
However, Hob was not one who yearned for companionship and had not ever sought out Thragun-which was right and proper-a noble guard and a house thewada had really very little to do with one another, as long as the safety of what they were responsible for was not threatened-
Thragun gave a very small growl. His head came higher and he sniffed an earthy, dried grass smell, whiffing up the stairs.
There was the faintest of scuttling sounds and something which might have been a ball of shadow detached itself from the wall on the right-hand side of the stairs. It landed beside the bowl with a plump and yellow eyes regarded Thragun slyly. Small but broad flat feet shuffled on the stone and Thragun saw Hob throw up his long thin arms, his fingers clawed as if in threat. Not that that meant anything-it was Hob's first line of defense to try to frighten.
"Hob's Hole-Hob's own-" The voice was high and cracked. "From the roasting to the bone.
Them as sees, shall not look Them's as blind, they shall be shook, Sweep it up and sweep it down-Hob shall clear it all around."
Whether Hob could read thoughts the cat had no way of telling, but certainly he had grasped ideas quickly enough before. So now Thragun wasted no time in coming straight to the point.
"There is a Khon of great evil now under this roof."
Hob had reached out with both hands for the bowl of offering, but he did not lift it from the floor. Instead he turned his head to one side, his face toward the kitchen door and partly from the cat. It was very wrinkled that face, with eyes far too large, a pair of slits for a nose, and a sharply pointed chin as if he shared a bill with a bird. His eyes, which appeared to give forth a glow of their own, blinked slowly and then swung back to the cat.
Thragun nodded. Hob had forgotten his usual greed, at least long enough to give heed to the cat.
"The master of this household," the cat continued, "has been gifted by an enemy with the source of great evil. Should it escape under this roof, we shall know trouble, and that heavy and soon."
Hob blinked again and then looked down at the bowl. He snatched it up as if Thragun might dispute his ownership and gulped down its contents without even stopping to chew the tender chunks of meat.
Thragun's quiver of tail signaled his impatience. If this were another of his own kind, they would not be wasting time in this fashion. Hob's tongue was out and he held the bowl at an angle where he could run that around the sides to catch the last drop.
Then his voice grated again:
"Hob's Hole!" He stamped one foot to emphasize his claim of ownership.
"Not while the Khon lingers here," the cat answered. "This is a Khon of power and it will take magic well rooted to send him forth again."
The distant sounds of servants' voices reached them and Hob shook his head violently. Thragun knew that refusal to venture far from the portion of the house which the thewada considered its own would hold as long as there was any bustle in the kitchen or the hallways. To impress Hob with the seriousness of this, he must wait until the lower floor of the house was quiet and deserted in the night and he could guide the other to see for himself what kind of darkness had come to trouble them.
Thragun slipped down the hall twice during the evening to see if anything had changed in the library. The box remained as it was. Yet as he marched around it each time, he became more and more uneasy. There was always a bad smell to Khon magic, and to the cat that seemed to grow stronger every time he made that circuit. Yet there was nothing he could do as yet.
He took his night guard position at last on the wide pillow beside Emmy and stretched out purring as he had for every night since he had assumed his rightful position in the household. Emmy stroked him.
"I am glad Papa is home," she said. "Nothing bad can happen when Papa is here-and you!"
Thragun waited until she was asleep and then slipped off the bed and out of the room. He sped at a gallop down hall and stairs. There were still people awake in the house and he could smell the scent of the Captain's cigar from the library. So warned, he crept in with the same care as when he was stalking and took up a position behind one of the long window drapes, hooking it a little aside with one paw so he could watch.
He had no more than taken up his position when the Captain got up and went to the table, pried open the box again, and shook off cotton covering to unveil the enemy, turning the teapot around in his hands and studying it carefully.
"You are ugly, aren't you?" Again he lifted the head lid and peered inside. "I don't think anyone would fancy drinking anything which had been brewed in you. The rajah might have had it in mind to frighten us when he sent this. You'd be better Off in a case where you'd be locked away from mischief."
He put down the pot on the table beside the box, making no effort to rewrap it. Then he shrugged, ground out his cigar in a copper tray, and made for the door, not giving the thing another look, as if he had forgotten it already.