The illustration for this chapter is not on the facing page of the chapter beginning. Thumbing through the book, I see I was wrong about that -- the art is wherever the heck in the chapter the publisher put it. Oh well. I guess putting each one on the facing page would probably have upped the page count by a lot, and might've been harder to lay out well.
Anyway, our illustration today is a sinuous tree, with an equally-sinuous cat peeking out from behind a bough.
The 2nd sees Snuff and Jack back home after harvesting ingredients "at the place of a killing by somebody else." Snuff resumes his watchdoggery and spots the cat Graymalk spying around their house. As Snuff is Jack's animal companion in their work, so Graymalk is the companion of a witch called Crazy Jill, who's also involved in the business that preoccupies Snuff and his master.
This is another short chapter, only about three pages, counting the illustration, and it consists mostly of the conversation between our watchdog and the cat. Though both are very cagey with each other, they trade a little information, and we learn the names of other players in the game: Morris and MacCab, who seem to be a team, and their owl Nightwind; and the "mad monk" Rastov, and his snake, Quicklime, who lives in his belly.
One of the pleasures of this book is clocking the character inspirations. Knife-wielding Master Jack is an obvious nod to Jack the Ripper, while mad monk Rastov is a tip of the pen to Rasputin. I've never worked out if Crazy Jill was inspired by anyone in particular, though.
Morris and MacCab are a little tricky; my guess (and I think that of many readers) is that they're a reference to Burke and Hare, the murderous "resurrection men." There's certainly murder and graverobbing going on in the background of A Night in the Lonesome October, so it's not like they'd be out of place.
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