Excerpt
CHAPTER I THE GOLDEN GIRL
Under a canopied platform stood a young girl, modeling in clay. The glare of the California sunshine, filtering through the canvas, became mellowed, warm and golden. Above the girl's head—yellow like the stalk of wheat—there hovered a kind of aureola, as if there had risen above it a haze of impalpable gold dust.
A poet I know might have cried out that here ended his quest of the Golden Girl. Straight she stood at this moment, lovely of face, rounded of form, with an indescribable suggestion of latent physical power or magnetism. On her temples there were little daubs of clay, caused doubtless by impatient fingers sweeping back occasional wind blown locks of hair. There was even a daub on the side of her handsome sensitive nose.
Her hand, still filled with clay, dropped to her side, and a tableau endured for a minute or two, suggesting a remote period, a Persian idyl, mayhap. With a smile on her lips she stared at the living model. The chatoyant eyes of the leopard stared back, a flicker of restlessness in their brilliant yellow deeps. The tip of the tail twitched.
"You beautiful thing!" she said.
She began kneading the clay again, and with deft fingers added bits here and there to the creature which had grown up under her strong supple fingers.
"Kathlyn! Oh, Kit!"
The sculptress paused, the pucker left her brow, and she turned, her face beaming, for her sister Winnie was the apple of her eye, and she brooded over her as the mother would have done had the mother lived. For Winnie, dark as Kathlyn was light, was as careless and aimless as thistledown in the wind.
A collie leaped upon the platform and began pawing Kathlyn, and shortly after the younger sister followed. Neither of the girls noted the stiffening mustaches of the leopard. The animal rose, and his nostrils palpitated. He hated the dog with a hatred not unmixed with fear. Treachery is in the marrow of all cats. To breed them in captivity does not matter. Sooner or later they will strike. Never before had the leopard been so close to his enemy, free of the leash.
"Kit, it is just wonderful. However can you do it? Some day we'll make dad take us to Paris, where you can exhibit them."
A snarl from the leopard, answered by a growl from the collie, brought Kathlyn's head about. The cat leaped, but toward Winnie, not the collie. With a cry of terror Winnie turned and ran in the direction of the bungalow. Kathlyn, seizing the leash, followed like the wind, hampered though she was by the apron. The cat loped after the fleeing girl, gaining at each bound. The yelping of the collie brought forth from various points low rumbling sounds, which presently developed into roars.
Winnie turned sharply around the corner of the bungalow toward the empty animal cages, to attract her father and at the same time rouse some of the keepers. Seeing the door of an empty cage open, and that it was approached by a broad runway, she flew to it, entered and slammed the door and held it. The cat, now hot with the lust to kill, threw himself against the bars, snarling and spitting....