Explore "The Cat of the Cane-Brake" by Blanche Colton Williams on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
STARTING POINT. Frederick Stuart Greene wrote this story out of his experiences and observations as an engineer in certain Southern districts. The pine woods, the wretched cabin, the cane-brake, the rattlesnake, the brogan shoes -- these are concrete instances of his familiarity with the setting. The immediate germinal idea lies in an incident he recalled of seeing a severed rattlesnake head fastened to the leg of a man in camp.
PLOT. The compactly wrought plot is one of the best in recent fiction. It is formed, in the main, from the interweaving of two lines of interest. One has to do with the struggle between the yellow cat and the woman, Sally; the other spins out the sordid love affair between Sally and the young engineer. The climax of action shows a double defeat for the woman. The husband is the connecting link, as he is the third figure in the triangle story, and is the partisan of the cat in the other line of interest.