The Estray - Chapter 1 A Wild Cat

Some one was directing a quadrille in native fashion. There was much
laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the
man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been
a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily
near at hand.

A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and,
lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly
after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped.
This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his
weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.

"You, Mabel, don't you go home," she said.

She had not spoken loudly, but her voice beat against the walls of the
court as though it could have filled the whole moonlight night with
dangerous beauty. The listener outside lifted his head with a low,
startled exclamation. Suddenly the world was alive with adventure and
alarm.

"Mind your own business, you wild cat," answered a man's raucous
voice. "She's my wife, which is somethin' that your sort knows nothin'
about. Come on, you Mabel. You think that outlaw can keep me from
takin' home my wife, you're betting wrong."

Another silence; then the voice again, a little louder, as though the
speaker had stepped out into the center of the room.

"Mabel is not a-goin' home with you," it said; and the listener
outside threw back his head with the gesture of a man sensitive to
music who listens to some ecstatic melody. "She happens to be stoppin'
here with us to-night. You say that she's your wife, but that don't
mean that she belongs to you, body and soul, Bill Greer--not to you,
who don't possess your own body, or soul. Why, you can't keep your
feet steady, you can't pull your hand away from mine. You can't hold
your tipsy eyes on mine. Do you call that ownin' your own body? And as
fer your soul, it's a hell of rage and dirty feelin's that I'd hate to
burn my eyes by lookin' closely at."