“Why, there is Jusy,” he said.
“Yes,” said Rea. “Harry came for him before lunch. He said he had something to show him.”
As soon as Jusy caught sight of the carriage, he came running towards it, crying—
“Oh, Uncle George, stop! Rea! Come! I’ve found Snowball! Come, see him!”
Snowball had been missing for nearly a month, and nobody could imagine what had become of him. They finally came to the conclusion that he must have got killed in some way.
Mr. Connor stopped the horses; and Rea jumped out and ran after Jusy, and Mr. Connor followed. They found the boys watching excitedly, one at each end of a little bridge over the ditch, through which the water was brought down for irrigating Mr. Finch’s orchards. Harry’s dogs were there too, one at each end of the bridge, barking, yelping, watching as excitedly as the boys. But no Snowball.
“Where is he?” cried Rea.
“In under there,” exclaimed Jusy. “He’s got a rabbit in there; he’ll be out presently.”
Sure enough, there he was, plainly to be heard, scuffling and spitting under the bridge.
The poor little rabbit ran first to one end of the bridge, then to the other, trying to get out; but at each end he found a dog, barking to drive him back.
Presently Snowball appeared with the dead rabbit in his teeth. Dropping it on the ground, he looked up at the dogs, as much as to say, “There! Can’t I hunt rabbits as well as you do?” Then they all three, the two dogs and he, fell to eating the rabbit in the friendliest manner.
“Don’t you think!” cried Jusy. “He’s been hunting this way, with these dogs, all this time. You see they are so big they can’t get in under the bridge, and he can; so they drive the rabbits in under there, and he goes in and gets them. Isn’t he smart? Harry first saw him doing it two weeks ago, he says. He didn’t know it was our cat, and he wondered whose it could be. But Snowball and the dogs are great friends. They go together all the time; and wherever he is, if he hears them bark, he knows they’ve started up something, and he comes flying! I think it is just splendid!”
“Poor little thing!” said Rea, looking at the fast-disappearing rabbit.
“Why, you eat them yourself!” shouted Jusy. “You said it was as good as chicken, the other day. It isn’t any worse for cats and dogs to eat them, than it is for us; is it, Uncle George?”
“I think Jusy has the best of the argument this time, pet,” said Uncle George, looking fondly at Jusy.
“Girls are always that way,” said Harry politely. “My sisters are just so. They can’t bear to see anything killed.”
After this day, Rea spent most of her time in the cañon, watching the men at work on Ysidro’s house.
The cañon was a wild place; it was a sort of split in the rocky sides of the mountain; at the top it was not much more than two precipices joined together, with just room enough for a brook to come down. You can see in the picture where it was, though it looks there like little more than a groove in the rocks. But it was really so big in some places that huge sycamore trees grew in it, and there were little spaces of good earth, where Mr. Connor had planted orchards.
It was near these, at the mouth of the cañon, that he put Ysidro’s house. It was built out of mud bricks, called adobe, as near as possible like Ysidro’s old house—two small rooms, and a thatched roof made of reeds, which grew in a swamp.
But Mr. Connor did not call it Ysidro’s house. He called it Rea’s house; and the men called it “the señorita’s house.” It was to be her own, Mr. Connor said—her own to give as a present to Ysidro and Carmena.
When the day came for them to move in, Jim went down with the big wagon, and a bed in the bottom, to bring old Carmena up. There was plenty of room in the wagon, besides, for the few little bits of furniture they had.
Mr. Connor and Jusy and Rea were at the house waiting, when they came. The cook had made a good supper of meat and potato, and Rea had put it on the table, all ready for them.
When they lifted Carmena out of the wagon, she held, tight clutched in her hand, a small basket filled with earth; she seemed hardly willing to let go of it for a moment.
“What is that?” said Jusy.
“A few handfuls of the earth that was ours,” replied Ysidro. “We have brought it with us, to keep it always. The man who has our home will not miss it.”
The tears came into Mr. Connor’s eyes, and he turned away.
Rea did not understand. She looked puzzled; so did Jusy.
Jim explained. “The Indian women often do that,” he said. “When they have to move away from a home they love they carry a little of the earth with them; sometimes they put it in a little bag, and wear it hanging on their necks; sometimes they put it under their heads at night.”
“Yes,” said Carmena, who had listened to what Jim said. “One can sleep better on the earth that one loves.”
“I say, Rea!” cried Jusy. “It is a shame they had to come away!”
“I told you so, Jusy,” said Rea gently. “But you didn’t seem to care then.”
“Well, I do now!” he cried. “I didn’t think how bad they’d feel. Now if it were in Italy, I’d go and tell the King all about it. Who is there to tell here?” he continued, turning to his Uncle George. “Who is there here, to tell about such things? There must be somebody.”
Mr. Connor smiled sadly. “The trouble is, there are too many,” he said.
“Who is above all the rest?” persisted Jusy. “Isn’t there somebody at the top, as our King is in Italy?”
“Yes, there is one above all the rest,” replied Mr. Connor. “We call him the President.”
“Well, why don’t you write and tell him about Ysidro?” said Jusy. “I wish I could see him, I’d tell him. It’s a shame!”
“Even the President could not help this, Jusy,” said Mr. Connor. “The law was against poor Ysidro; there was no help; and there are thousands and thousands of Indians in just the same condition he is.”
“Doesn’t the President make the laws?” said Jusy.
“No,” said Mr. Connor. “Congress makes the laws.”
“Oh,” said Jusy, “like our Parliament.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Connor.
Jusy said no more; but he thought of little else all the afternoon; and at bedtime he said to Rea—
“Rea, I am real sorry I didn’t care about those old Indians at first, when you did. But I’m going to be good to them now, and help them all I can; and I have made up my mind that when I am a man I shall not go to Italy, as I said I would, to be an officer for the King. I shall stay here, and be an officer for the American President, instead; and I shall tell him about Ysidro, and about all the rest of the Indians.”
There is nothing more to be told about the Hunter Cats. By degrees they disappeared: some of them went to live at other houses in the San Gabriel Valley; some of them ran off and lived a wild life in the cañons; and some of them, I am afraid, must have died for want of food.
Rea was glad when they were all gone; but Jusy missed the fun of seeing them hunt gophers and linnets.
Perhaps, some day, I shall write another story, and tell you more about Jusy and Rea, and how they tried to help the Indians.
WHITE COMMA, by A. R. Morlan
White comma against
heat-stick asphalt,
her head curled close to her
limp, brown-gray flecked tail,
the heat of her body
mirrors the street warmth below
So much so
that I carry her most
carefully, tenderly,
for block
after block,
taking her to the home
she never lived to see
And on the ersatz grassy green
of my front porch floor
I cradle her in
old sheets meant for
keeping the plants warm against
the frost
making sure her sightless<
br />
eyes and breathless
nose are exposed to the air
she doesn’t need
For all the hours she
rests there, beyond the need for comfort
I watch her from the porch window,
telling myself that the wind
will soon stop blowing,
and that she’ll make the sheet above her rise
on its own soon
White comma against
peeling green-painted boards,
crossed paws pointing
forward, forward
toward the porch wall,
cool body mirroring the wood’s
dead lack of warmth
The hole by the garage
has been dug,
the crumbling soil
patted smooth,
pressed smooth,
she was still-kitten small
she was comma still
on an unfluttering page.
AFTERWORD
I did find a dead kitten, still quite warm, on the street one day, and took it home—but first left it on the front porch, lying in a towel, and kept looking at it, waiting, hoping, that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t dead, but just hurt. Eventually, I buried her by my garage. She was really dead.
NINE LIVES, by E. Nesbit
“Mother,” said the yellow kitten, “is it true that we cats have nine lives?”
“Quite, my dear,” the brindled cat replied. She was a very handsome cat, and in very comfortable circumstances. She sat on a warm Turkey carpet, and wore a blue satin ribbon round her neck. “I am in the ninth life myself,” she said.
“Have you lived all your lives here?”
“Oh dear, no!”
“Were you here,” the white kitten asked, in a sleepy voice, “when the Turkey carpet was born? Rover says it is only a few months old.”
“No,” said the mother, “I was not. Indeed, it was partly the softness of that carpet that made me come and live here.”
“Where did you live before?” the black kitten said.
A dreamy look came into the brindled cat’s eyes.
“In many strange places,” she answered slowly; adding more briskly, “and if you will be good kittens, I will tell you all about them. Goldie! Come down from that stool, and sit down like a good kitten. Sweep! Leave off sharpening your claws on the furniture; that always ends in trouble and punishment. Snowball! You’re asleep again! Oh, well, if you’d rather sleep than hear a story—”
Snowball shook herself awake, and the others sat down close to their mother with their tails arranged neatly beside them, and waited for the story.
“I was born,” said the brindled cat, “in a barn.”
“What is a barn?” asked the black kitten.
“A barn is like a house, but there is only one room, and no carpets, only straw.”
“I should like that,” said the yellow kitten, who often played among the straw in the big box which brought groceries from the Stores.
“I liked it well enough when I was your age,” said the mother indulgently, “but a barn is not at all a genteel place to be born in. My mother had had a little unpleasantness with the family she lived with, and, of course, she was too proud to stay on after that. And so she left them, and went to live in the barn. It wasn’t at all the sort of life she had been accustomed to.”
“What was the unpleasantness?” Sweep asked.
“Well, it was about some cream which the woman of the house wanted for her tea. She should have said so. Of course, my mother would not have taken it if she had had any idea that anyone else wanted it. She was always most unselfish.”
“What is tea?”
“A kind of brown milk—very nasty indeed, and very bad for you. Well, I lived with my brothers and sisters very happily for some months, for I was too young to know how vulgar it was to live in a barn and play with straw.”
“What is vulgar, mother?”
“Dear, dear; how you do ask questions,” said the brindled cat, beginning to look worried. “Vulgar is being like everybody else.”
“But does everybody else live in a barn?”
“No; nobody does who is respectable. Vulgar really means—not like respectable cats.”
“Oh!” said the black kitten and the yellow, trying to look as if they understood. But the white one did not say anything, because it had gone to sleep again.
“Well,” the mother went on, “after a while they took me to live in the farm-house. And I should have liked it well enough, only they had a low habit of locking up the dairy and the pantry. Well, it would be tiresome to go into the whole story; however, I soon finished my life at the farmhouse and went to live in the stable. It was very pleasant there. Horses are excellent company. That was my third life. My fourth was at the miller’s. He came one day to buy some corn; he saw me, and admired me—as, indeed, everyone has always done. He and the farmer were disputing about the price of the corn, and at last the miller said—
“‘Look here; you shall have your price if you’ll throw me that cat into the bargain.’”
The kittens all shuddered. “What is a bargain? Is it like a pond? And were you thrown in?”
“I was thrown in, I believe. But a bargain is not like a pond; though I heard the two men talk of ‘wetting’ the bargain. But I suppose they did not do it, for I arrived at the mill quite dry. That was a very pleasant life—full of mice!”
“Who was full of mice?” asked the white kitten, waking up for a moment.
“I was,” said the mother sharply; “and I should have stayed in the mill forever, but the miller had another cat sent him by his sister.
“However, he gave me away to a man who worked a barge up and down the river. I suppose he thought he should like to see me again sometimes as the barge passed by.
“Life in a barge is very exciting. There are such lots of rats, some of them as big as you kittens. I got quite clever at catching them, though sometimes they made a very good fight for it. I used to have plenty of milk, and I slept with the bargee in his warm little bunk, and of nights I sat and toasted myself in front of his fire in the small, cozy cabin. He was very fond of me, and used to talk to me a great deal. It is so lonely on a barge that you are glad of a little conversation. He was very kind to me, and I was very grieved when he married a lady who didn’t like cats, and who chased me out of the barge with a barge-pole.”
“What is a barge-pole?” the yellow kitten asked lazily.
“The only leg a barge has. I ran away into the woods, and there I lived on birds and rabbits.”
“What are rabbits?”
“Something like cats with long ears; very wholesome and nutritious. And I should have liked my sixth life very much, but for the keeper. No, don’t interrupt to ask what a keeper is. He is a man who, when he meets a cat or a rabbit, points a gun at it, and says ‘Bang!’ so loud that you die of fright.”
“How horrible!” said all the kittens.
“I was looking out for my seventh life, and also for the gamekeeper, and was sitting by the river with both eyes and both ears open, when a little girl came by—a nice little girl in a checked pinafore.
“She stopped when she saw me, and called—‘Pussy! Pussy!’ So I went very slowly to her, and rubbed myself against her legs. Then she picked me up and carried me home in the checked pinafore. My seventh life was spent in a clean little cottage with this little girl and her mother. She was very fond of me, and I was as fond of her as a cat can be of a human being. Of course, we are never so unreasonably fond of them as they are of us.”
“Why not?” asked the yellow kitten, who was young and affectionate.
“Because they’re only human beings, and we are Cats,” returned the mother, turning her large, calm green eyes on Goldie, who said, “Oh!” and no more.
“Well, what happened then?” asked the black kitten, catching its mother’s eye.
“Well, one day the little girl put me into a basket, and carried me
out. I was always a fine figure of a cat, and I must have been a good weight to carry. Several times she opened the basket to kiss and stroke me. The last time she did it we were in a room where a sick girl lay on a bed.
“‘I did not know what to bring you for your birthday,’ said my little girl, ‘so I’ve brought you my dear pussy.’
“The sick girl’s eyes sparkled with delight. She took me in her arms and stroked me. And though I do not like sick people, I felt flattered and pleased. But I only stayed a very little time with her.”
“Why?” asked all the kittens at once.
“Because—but no; that story’s too sad for you children; I will tell it you when you’re older.”
“But that only makes eight lives,” said Sweep, who had been counting on his claws, “and you said you had nine. Which was the ninth?”
“Why, this, you silly child,” said the brindled pussy, sitting up, and beginning to wash the kitten’s face very hard indeed. “And as it’s my last life, I must be very careful of it. That’s why I’m so particular about what I eat and drink, and why I make a point of sleeping so many hours a-day. But it’s your first life, Snowball, and I can’t have you wasting it all in sleep. Go and catch a mouse at once.”
“Yes, mamma,” said Snowball, and went to sleep again immediately.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Brindle, “I’ll wash you next. That’ll make you wake up, my dear.”
“Snowball’s always sleepy,” said the yellow kitten, stretching itself. “But, mamma dear, she doesn’t care for history, and yours was a very long tale.”
“You can’t have too much of a good thing,” said the mother, looking down at her long brindled tail. “If it’s a good tail, the longer it is, the better.”
THE BLACK CAT OF THE OLD MANOR HOUSE, by Elliott O’Donnell
I will commence with a case of hauntings in the Old Manor House, at Oxenby.
My informant was a Mrs. Hartnoll, whom I can see in my mind’s eye, as distinctly as if I were looking at her now. Hers was a personality that no lapse of time, nothing could efface; a personality that made itself felt on boys of all temperaments, most of all, of course, on those who—like myself—were highly strung and sensitive.
The Second Cat Megapack: Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New Page 21