by Gary Lovisi
My chance came the next day when two plainclothes detectives called at LeGrange Mansion. Shots had been reported.
Of course, there was no way I could get close to the detectives, Beverly and Rod would see to that. And even if I did, there was no way I could make them understand what I was trying to tell them, after all, humans are not adept enough to communicate with felines yet.
“Funny thing about that cat following us,” one detective said. He was a large bull-necked fellow in a too-tight suit. He watched me carefully, as I played catch-me-if-you-can with young Roderick Thorpe who seemed to protest too much at my presence. “It’s almost as if that cat knows something, or is trying to tell me something.”
“That cat’s a damn pain in the ass, detective,” Beverly said smoothly, steering him away from my direction, but this cop was a smart one and would not be steered. Beverly, angry now added, “I should have had it taken care of a long time ago.”
I saw the detective’s eyebrows raise precipitously in interest.
The other detective looked at Beverly and said carefully, “Then it’s not your cat, Ms. LeGrange?”
Beverly stumbled for a mere second, regained her composure and replied, “Heaven’s no, detective. I would never own a cat. That’s just some stray that wandered onto the grounds the night that Stuart was due home. Been wandering around ever since, just a general nuisance. I have half a mind to sic the dogs on it.”
Roderick Thorpe suddenly grew concerned when saw the two detectives beginning to walk onto the grounds, and asked, “Ah, detective? Where are you going?”
“This is such a nice estate here, I thought Wendell and I would look around a bit. You don’t mind, do you?” he said, carefully.
Thorpe couldn’t reply, but he grew nervous as he saw the two cops were now investigating the grounds around the house. That would not do. Not at all. Why, it looked as if they were actually following that damn cat!
“Did I ever tell you my ex-wife had a cat, Wendell?” The cop named Joe Walker said to his partner as they walked further into the grounds, followed by a very nervous pair of murderers.
“All the time, Joe.…”
“Excuse me, detectives? Just where do you think you are going?” Beverly LeGrange said with a perceptible twinge of panic in her soft voice.
“Yes, detectives, what gives?” Thorpe added now, rather a bit too insistently.
The larger of the two detectives, a big, brawny fellow by the name of Wendell Paige said, “Just looking, Ms. LeGrange. That’s not a problem for either of you, is it? Because if it is.… Me an’ my partner, just looking, is all.”
“But, ah, it’s cold out here. Why not come back in the house, Detective Paige? Detective Walker?” Beverly offered, trying to cut them off, but they walked on, outflanking her, following the cat walking ahead of them.
“We’re just looking. Taking a walk. Lovely day for a walk, isn’t it, Ms. LeGrange?” Walker replied.
Now Thorpe was nervous.
He heard Beverly growl under her breath as she walked away, “That damn cat! I’ll fix her!”
* * * *
The dogs were set loose a minute later by Beverly. Big, howling brutes with large teeth, big mouths, and voracious appetites for all things, especially feline. Let me tell you something, dahling, I was not at all amused by this turn of events, but it did give me an idea.
I knew the dogs would be after me soon, because they’d scented my spoor and immediately give chase. I was determined to use that instinct in them, use it to lead the dogs to Stuart LeGrange’s hidden grave, even at considerable danger to my own physical well-being. I flew across the well-manicured lawn, down past a thicket of trees and into a secluded meadow behind the house. The dogs were right behind me. There were six of them and they operated as a pack. They had my scent committed to memory and locked onto the sites of their marauding jaws.
When I reached the gravesite I began digging and clawing furiously into the earth. I had little time. I had to free Stuart LeGrange’s spoor from where it was embedded in the ground of the grave, get it exposed to the air where the dogs could smell it. I knew it would be close, that my margin for error was slim, if nonexistent. So I dug and clawed deeper and deeper into the soft soil of the murdered man’s grave.
Then the dogs were upon me. They practically flew into the clearing, raging brutes, all-fiery eyes and slavering jaws just waiting to take some canine-size bites out of my furry little hide. I hissed and jumped back, trying my best to defend my turf as I did all I could to mix up the spoor of Stuart LeGrange that so permeated the soil with my own. It worked!
First one, then another of the huge dogs began to growl and cry, whine and claw the ground, pushing their great ugly snouts into the dirt and then lifting their great ugly heads and crying loudly to the heavens. By the time Beverly and Roderick arrived, I could see that the two detectives, who each held their service revolvers in their hands, accompanied them meaningfully.
The dogs were positively frantic now. They had found the spoor of their dead master Stuart LeGrange and were busy ripping into the loose soil of his unmarked grave.
Detective Walker took in the scene immediately, said to his partner, “Wendell, I think we may have solved that Stuart LeGrange missing person case.”
“Yeah, Joe, but I think we just got ourselves another case, a murder case,” Paige replied.
Then he took out his cuffs, ordering Beverly and Roderick, “Now you two wanna come over here. Slowly.”
The dogs continued to dig. It wasn’t long before they brought up what appeared to be a spotted sheet, torn and full of dry blood, and not soon afterwards, a man’s arm was visible in the dark dirt. The dogs whined madly, they had discovered their master.
Wendell Paige said, “Well, Joe, if that don’t beat all. That cat’s got real moxy. I think I’ll take it home to Martha, she’d like a smart cat like that.”
* * * *
From my vantage point on the hood of the detective’s car, I finished my meal of Tasty Tuna, then looked at Beverly and Roderick where they sat glaring at me, cuffed in the back seat of the police car. I gently lifted my tail in the air, giving them a full view of my exposed nether parts, insulting in the extreme. I thought of my dear mistress and rubbed my whiskers in satisfaction.
That will teach you to make trouble for Mrs. Milligan’s cat, dahlings!
Feline revenge is sweet!
Rest gently, dear Cynthia.
A REVOLT OF THE GODS, by Ambrose Bierce
My father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, my mother kept the only shop for the sale of cats’-meat in my native city. They did not live happily; the difference in social rank was a chasm which could not be bridged by the vows of marriage. It was indeed an ill-assorted and most unlucky alliance; and as might have been foreseen it ended in disaster. One morning after the customary squabbles at breakfast, my father rose from the table, quivering and pale with wrath, and proceeding to the parsonage thrashed the clergyman who had performed the marriage ceremony. The act was generally condemned and public feeling ran so high against the offender that people would permit dead dogs to lie on their property until the fragrance was deafening rather than employ him; and the municipal authorities suffered one bloated old mastiff to utter itself from a public square in so clamorous an exhalation that passing strangers supposed themselves to be in the vicinity of a saw-mill. My father was indeed unpopular. During these dark days the family’s sole dependence was on my mother’s emporium for cats’-meat.
The business was profitable. In that city, which was the oldest in the world, the cat was an object of veneration. Its worship was the religion of the country. The multiplication and addition of cats were a perpetual instruction in arithmetic. Naturally, any inattention to the wants of a cat was punished with great severity in this world and the next; so my good mother numbered her patrons by the hundred. Still, with an unproductive husband and seventeen children she had some difficulty in making both ends cats’-meat; and at last the nec
essity of increasing the discrepancy between the cost price and the selling price of her carnal wares drove her to an expedient which proved eminently disastrous: she conceived the unlucky notion of retaliating by refusing to sell cats’-meat until the boycott was taken off her husband.
On the day when she put this resolution into practice the shop was thronged with excited customers, and others extended in turbulent and restless masses up four streets, out of sight. Inside there was nothing but cursing, crowding, shouting and menace. Intimidation was freely resorted to—several of my younger brothers and sisters being threatened with cutting up for the cats—but my mother was as firm as a rock, and the day was a black one for Sardasa, the ancient and sacred city that was the scene of these events. The lock-out was vigorously maintained, and seven hundred and fifty thousand cats went to bed hungry!
The next morning the city was found to have been placarded during the night with a proclamation of the Federated Union of Old Maids. This ancient and powerful order averred through its Supreme Executive Head that the boycotting of my father and the retaliatory lock-out of my mother were seriously imperiling the interests of religion. The proclamation went on to state that if arbitration were not adopted by noon that day all the old maids of the federation would strike—and strike they did.
The next act of this unhappy drama was an insurrection of cats. These sacred animals, seeing themselves doomed to starvation, held a mass-meeting and marched in procession through the streets, swearing and spitting like fiends. This revolt of the gods produced such consternation that many pious persons died of fright and all business was suspended to bury them and pass terrifying resolutions.
Matters were now about as bad as it seemed possible for them to be. Meetings among representatives of the hostile interests were held, but no understanding was arrived at that would hold. Every agreement was broken as soon as made, and each element of the discord was frantically appealing to the people. A new horror was in store.
It will be remembered that my father was a deodorizer of dead dogs, but was unable to practice his useful and humble profession because no one would employ him. The dead dogs in consequence reeked rascally. Then they struck! From every vacant lot and public dumping ground, from every hedge and ditch and gutter and cistern, every crystal rill and the clabbered waters of all the canals and estuaries—from all the places, in short, which from time immemorial have been preempted by dead dogs and consecrated to the uses of them and their heirs and successors forever—they trooped innumerous, a ghastly crew! Their procession was a mile in length. Midway of the town it met the procession of cats in full song. The cats instantly exalted their backs and magnified their tails; the dead dogs uncovered their teeth as in life, and erected such of their bristles as still adhered to the skin.
The carnage that ensued was too awful for relation! The light of the sun was obscured by flying fur, and the battle was waged in the darkness, blindly and regardless. The swearing of the cats was audible miles away, while the fragrance of the dead dogs desolated seven provinces.
How the battle might have resulted it is impossible to say, but when it was at its fiercest the Federated Union of Old Maids came running down a side street and sprang into the thickest of the fray. A moment later my mother herself bore down upon the warring hosts, brandishing a cleaver, and laid about her with great freedom and impartiality. My father joined the fight, the municipal authorities engaged, and the general public, converging on the battle-field from all points of the compass, consumed itself in the center as it pressed in from the circumference. Last of all, the dead held a meeting in the cemetery and resolving on a general strike, began to destroy vaults, tombs, monuments, headstones, willows, angels and young sheep in marble—everything they could lay their hands on. By nightfall the living and the dead were alike exterminated, and where the ancient and sacred city of Sardasa had stood nothing remained but an excavation filled with dead bodies and building materials, shreds of cat and blue patches of decayed dog. The place is now a vast pool of stagnant water in the center of a desert.
The stirring events of those few days constituted my industrial education, and so well have I improved my advantages that I am now Chief of Misrule to the Dukes of Disorder, an organization numbering thirteen million American working men.
MONTY’S FRIEND, by William Livingston Alden
The discovery of gold at Thompson’s Flat, near the northern boundary of Montana, had been promptly followed by the expected rush of bold and needy adventurers. But disappointment awaited them. Undoubtedly there was gold a few feet below the surface, but it was not found in quantities sufficient to compensate for the labor, privation, and danger which the miners were compelled to undergo.
It is true that the first discoverer of gold, who had given his name to the Flat, had found a “pocket,” which had made him a rich man; but his luck remained unique, and as Big Simpson sarcastically remarked, “A man might as well try to find a pocket in a woman’s dress as to search for a second pocket in Thompson’s Flat.” For eight months of the year the ground was frozen deep and hard, and during the brief summer the heat was intense. There were hostile Indians in the vicinity of the camp, and although little danger was to be apprehended from them while the camp swarmed with armed miners, there was every probability that they would sooner or later attack the handful of men who had remained, after the great majority of the miners had abandoned their claims and gone in search of more promising fields.
In the early part of the summer following Thompson’s discovery of gold, there were but thirty men left in the camp, with only a single combined grocery and saloon to minister to their wants. Partly because of obstinacy, and partly because of a want of energy to repeat the experiment of searching for gold in some other unprofitable place, these thirty men remained, and daily prosecuted their nearly hopeless search for fortune. Their evenings were spent in the saloon, but there was a conspicuous absence of anything like jollity. The men were too poor to gamble with any zest, and the whiskey of the saloon keeper was bad and dear.
The one gleam of good fortune which had come to the camp was the fact that the Indians had disappeared, having, as it was believed, gone hundreds of miles south to attack another tribe. Gradually the miners relaxed the precautions which had at first been maintained against an attack, and although every man went armed to his work, sentinels were no longer posted either by day or night, and the Gatling gun that had been bought by public subscription in the prosperous days of the camp remained in the storeroom of the saloon without ammunition, and with its mechanism rusty and immovable.
Only one miner had arrived at Thompson’s Flat that summer. He was a middle-aged man who said that his name was Montgomery Carleton—a name which instantly awoke the resentment of the camp, and was speedily converted into “Monte Carlo” by the resentful miners, who intimated very plainly that no man could carry a fifteen-inch name in that camp and live. Monte Carlo, or Monty, as he was usually called, had the further distinction of being the ugliest man in the entire northwest. He had, at some unspecified time, been kicked in the face by a mule, with the result that his features were converted into a hideous mask. He seemed to be of a social disposition, and would have joined freely in the conversation which went on at the saloon, but his advances were coldly received.
Instead of pitying the man’s misfortune, and avoiding all allusion to it, the miners bluntly informed him that he was too ugly to associate with gentlemen, and that a modest and retiring attitude was what public sentiment required of him. Monty took the rebuff quietly, and thereafter rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. He continued to frequent the saloon, sitting in the darkest corner, where he smoked his pipe, drank his solitary whisky, and answered with pathetic pleasure any remark that might be flung at him, even when it partook of the nature of a coarse jest at his expense.
One gloomy evening Monty entered the saloon half an hour later than usual. It had been raining all day, and the spirits of the camp had gone down with the barome
ter. The men were more than ever conscious of their bad luck, and having only themselves to blame for persistently remaining at Thompson’s Flat, were ready to cast the guilt of their folly on the nearest available scapegoat. Monty was accustomed to entering the room unnoticed, but on the present occasion he saw that instead of contemptuously ignoring his presence, the other occupants of the saloon were unmistakably scowling at him. Scarcely had he made his timid way to his accustomed seat when Big Simpson said in a loud voice:
“Gentlemen, have you noticed that our luck has been more particularly low down ever since that there beauty in the corner had the cheek to sneak in among us?”
“That’s so!” exclaimed Slippery Jim. “Monty is ugly enough to spoil the luck of a blind nigger.”
“You see,” continued Simpson, “thishyer beauty is like the Apostle Jonah. While he was aboard ship there wasn’t any sort of luck, and at last the crew took and hove him overboard, and served him right. There’s a mighty lot of wisdom in the Scriptures, if you only take hold of ’em in the right way. My dad was a preacher, and I know what I’m talking about.”
“That’s more than the rest of us does,” retorted Slippery Jim. “We ain’t no ship’s crew and Monty ain’t no apostle. If you mean we ought to heave him into the creek, why don’t you say so?”
“It wouldn’t do him any harm,” replied Simpson. “He’s a dirty beast, and this camp hasn’t no call to associate with men that’s afraid of water, except, of course, when it comes to drinking it.”
“I’m as clean as any man here,” said Monty, stirred for the moment to indignation. “Mining ain’t the cleanest sort of work, and I don’t find no fault with Simpson nor any other man if he happens to carry a little of his claim around with him.”
“That’ll do,” said Simpson severely. “We don’t allow no such cuss as you to make reflections on gentlemen. We’ve put up with your ugly mug altogether too long, and I for one ain’t going to do it no longer. What do you say, gentlemen?” he continued, turning to his companions, “shall we trifle with our luck, and lower our self-respect any longer by tolerating the company of that there disreputable, low-down, miserable coyote? I go for boycotting him. Let him work his own claim and sleep in his own cabin if he wants to, but don’t let him intrude himself into this saloon or into our society anywhere else.”