CATS, AND MORE CATS!
Tutter is a small town and it wasn’t very long before everybody
thereabouts knew of the feline rest farm. On the few occasions when the
professor went down town he attracted a great deal of amused attention.
People meeting him in the streets looked at him and smiled. It is
always that way with men who have the courage to start something new. I
read one time that the man who invented the umbrella was arrested when
he appeared in a London street on a rainy day with his new contrivance
raised above his head. And when bathtubs first came out some of our big
American cities passed laws against them, the doctors contending that
people who took baths in the winter time would catch cold and die. So
it wasn’t surprising that a lot of Tutter people saw fit to laugh at
the professor’s scheme. They didn’t know any better.
Once when we were down town getting a load of boxes we met the
Stricker gang. We hate them like they hate us. Bid and Jimmy Stricker
are cousins and one is just as mean as the other, only Bid is the
ringleader, kind of. He went “meow!” at us. He didn’t do any more
“meowing” though when Peg lit into him. Peg’s a scrapper, I’ll tell the
world. We chased the whole gang into Zulutown. That part of town beyond
the brickyard where the Stricker cousins live is called Zulutown. The
kids who live there and pal around with Bid and Jimmy are a tough lot.
All they want to do is fight and destroy things. The only time they
ever go to Sunday-school is just before Christmas. That’s a pretty
cheap way of getting a present.
While we were working in the old mill, getting the cat boxes fixed up
with slats up and down the front and each box numbered, the professor
wrote the advertisement about the feline rest farm and sent it to the
_Chicago Tribune_. It was a dandy advertisement, we thought, with a
lot of big words that made it sound important. When the advertisement
appeared in the newspaper it attracted a great deal of attention. We
came to realize this more fully in the days that immediately followed.
Here is the advertisement:
PROFESSOR ELLSWORTH STONER’S
FELINE REST FARM
Give your pet feline the same thoughtful care and scientific
attention that you bestow upon your children.
I will help you. Having made a life study of the _felis domestica_
I have arranged to give the public elect the benefit of my years of
research and have established at Tutter, Illinois, the first Feline
Rest Farm in the world.
For the small sum of one dollar per week you can have your pet feline
domiciled in my Feline Rest Home. For this insignificant sum your
feline will be given scientific care and attention. Should you be
leaving your city home for the summer, arrange to have your feline
placed under my care.
Only a limited number of felines will be accommodated, so act at once
and avoid possible disappointment.
_Professor Ellsworth Stoner’s Feline Rest Farm,
Tutter, Illinois._
The advertisement appeared in the newspaper Monday morning and on
Tuesday the cats began to arrive. A box containing two cats came first,
followed by two crates, one containing seven cats and the other nine.
On the noon train from Chicago a third crate arrived, packed so full
of cats it was a wonder some of them weren’t squashed. We thought there
must be fully thirty cats in the crate, but when we came to count them
there were only eighteen.
We were kept so busy unpacking cats that we never once thought of
going home to dinner. The professor was very much excited over the way
things were turning out. We were excited, too. It was plain to us that
the cat farm was going to be a humdinger of a success. A feeling of
satisfaction grew up within us in the thought that we had taken hold of
this new idea of the professor’s and were helping to make it work. Any
one can copy another person’s idea. We weren’t copying. We were doing
something that never had been done before. That is what filled us with
quiet pride when success came crowding in. I bet Mr. Edison has the
same happy feeling when he finally gets the kinks ironed out of his
great mechanical inventions and the wheels and cogs spin around just as
he wants them to.
We had placed the black cat in box number one. When the other cats were
distributed thirty-seven boxes were occupied. And such a collection
of cats! None of them looked like what you’d call high-toned cats.
Rich people’s cats, I mean. Scoop said they looked to him like alley
cats. We were disappointed in this, having figured that cats coming
from wealthy homes would be different than the cats we had been used
to seeing in Tutter--something a little nicer, as it were, with long,
silky hair, or something like that.
There were white cats and black cats; yellow cats and maltese cats;
tiger cats and calico cats. There were cats with short tails and cats
with long tails. One had lost a foot. Two had damaged ears. Another was
blind in its left eye. Some of them had no pep at all; others wanted to
be spitting and clawing all the time.
And could they yowl? I’ll tell the world! They were considerably
frightened from their trip to Tutter in the baggage car and every time
we walked past their boxes they set up a fearful racket. Each one
seemed determined to yowl louder and longer than its neighbors.
According to the professor’s figures thirty-seven cats meant
thirty-seven dollars a week, only one of the cats was Blacky, the cat
he brought to Tutter in the covered basket, which made thirty-six
dollars a week. That was a corking good start. The feline rest farm was
going to be a big money maker all right.
Shortly after the one o’clock whistles blew Peg came back from town
with a letter addressed to Professor Stoner’s Feline Rest Farm. It
was mailed from Chicago and we hoped it would contain money. It did.
When Scoop, at the professor’s request, opened the envelope out
dropped a ten-dollar bill. The letter was signed by a Chicago lady
named Mrs. Peter Kepple. She stated that she was shipping us her prize
rose-colored cat, Lady Victoria, valued at five hundred dollars. She
mentioned in the letter that later on she planned to spend a few days
at the Walkers Lake Sanitarium and would then call at our rest farm and
get her cat.
Scoop dropped the letter and flourished the ten-dollar bill.
“Hot dog!” he cried, getting in a few fancy dance steps with his big
feet.
Peg picked up the letter and squinted at it.
“A five-hundred-dollar cat,” he said in a reflective voice. “What do
you know about that!”
The professor was plainly bewildered.
“Dear me!” he murmured. “How very extraordinary. I am at a loss to
comprehend what the dear lady means in her reference to a rose-colored
feline. Are you sure it says rose-colored?”
Peg handed him the letter and he squinted at it over the top of his
spectacles.
“Whoever heard of a rose-colored cat?” Scoop put in. “Why, rose color
is a sort of pink and red mixed. I know, because one time we sold
colored tissue paper in pa’s store. Whoever heard of a red cat?”
“Well,” I spoke up, “it would have to be red or green or some fancy
color to be worth five hundred dollars.”
“Astounding!” came weakly from the professor. “Really, there must
be some mistake. I quite assure you there is no such thing as a
rose-colored feline.”
Scoop laughed and rustled the ten-dollar bill.
“There isn’t any mistake about the money,” he said. “We should worry
what color cats the rich people send us as long as they send the
necessary jack.”
The professor continued to frown in a bewildered way and teetered back
and forth across the room, his hands working nervously behind his back.
I guess it was an awful shock to him to learn that there was a certain
kind of cat in the world he didn’t know about. After a few minutes he
drew a small book from his coat pocket and seating himself to one side
began checking up certain items and references on various pages. He
was mumbling to himself but we didn’t catch the words. Presently he
glanced up at us and slowly shook his head.
“Impossible,” he murmured. “Quite impossible. The dear lady must be
trying to spoof us.”
Scoop grinned.
“She can spoof us all she wants to at ten dollars a spoof,” said he.
I guess you can imagine how tickled we were. The letter and ten-dollar
bill was evidence of our success. We had felt pretty enthusiastic when
the cats arrived; but now that the money was coming in we were in a
mood to bubble over.
While we were talking about the rose-colored cat we heard heavy
footsteps without the door and two men in blue uniforms came into the
mill. They were strangers to us and looked like street car conductors
in the city, sort of. When the professor saw them he gave a screech and
I thought for a moment that he was going to throw a fit.
One of the men quickly stepped forward and patted him on the arm.
“There, there, purfessor! Nothin’ to git excited about. Take it cool,
old dear; take it cool. We just thought we’d drop in and see if you
aren’t through with your little vacation. Now, purfessor, don’t lose
your head. Be calm; be calm. If you only knew how much we’ve missed
you, you would want to hurry back with us.”
For a moment we were too astonished to say a word. We just stood there
and stared, our lower jaws sagging like we didn’t know very much. It
came to me in a vague way that the men were policemen or some kind of
guards. The professor was whimpering like a baby. I realized from his
actions that something was wrong.
Scoop recovered his voice.
“Wha-at’s the rip?” he wanted to know, looking first at the professor,
then at the guards.
“He’s just a little off up here,” one of the men explained, tapping the
side of his head. “Belongs over at the county infirmary. Harmless and
all that, but a bug on cats. Thinks he’s the great know-it-all when it
comes to cats. Plumb nonsense, of course.” Here the guard paused and
glanced around the room at the cat boxes. A grin spread over his big
red face. “I see he’s been working his hobby overtime.”
Scoop made a gurgling sound in his throat.
“But you--you aren’t going to take him away!” he cried.
“Sure thing,” replied the guard.
“You can’t do that,” Scoop argued, “because this is his feline rest
farm. He started it, and all these cats have been sent to him to be
taken care of. What are we going to do with the cats if you take him
away?”
The guard ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged his broad
shoulders.
“Sorry, boys, but we’ve got to take him back with us. We came for him.
If we were to go back without him the superintendent would fire us.”
In his actions Scoop made me think of a drowning man grabbing at straws.
“Maybe there’s some mistake,” he cried. “You say he belongs at the
county infirmary, but he came from Chicago. We were at the depot the
day he got here. He was right with the Chicago crowd.”
“Probably got on the train at Ashton,” said the guard, naming a
neighboring town. Then he turned from Scoop and instructed his
companion: “Look around, Taylor, and pick up his things. That’s his
basket over there. Are you ready, purfessor? Fine! Well, good-by, boys.
Thanks for taking care of our friend till we managed to locate him.”
The professor didn’t want to leave. He tried to hold back, but the
guards were big men and he was helpless in their hands. They took a
firm grip on his arms and hurried him out of the mill and into an
automobile standing in front.
Well, I can’t describe our feelings as the professor and the guards
disappeared through the doorway of the old mill, leaving us alone with
the cats. For several moments we stood there staring at one another.
Sort of stunned and horrified-like. No one said a word. Then the guard
named Taylor returned to the door.
“The purfessor seems kinda worried about somethin’ and asked me to come
back and tell you there hain’t no sech animal as a rose-colored cat. A
rose-colored cat! Wouldn’t that put a grin on Sober Sue! Haw! haw! haw!
That’s all, boys. Good-by and good luck.”
We heard his footsteps die away. An automobile motor churned into
motion. There was a clashing of gears. Then silence.
Scoop acted as though his knees were giving out.
“Good night!” he screeched, dropping onto the nearest cat box. “Just
think, fellows: The professor loony and no one to take care of this
gang of cats but us.” Then he let out another yip as the cat beneath
him yowled and slapped at his dangling legs with its claws.
Peg gave a sickly grin.
“I don’t know,” said he, “are we lucky or not.”
“Lucky!” snorted Scoop. “With this gang of hungry cats on our hands!
How do you get like that?”
“Well,” said Peg in his deliberate way, “we’ll be lucky, won’t we, if
we can run this cat farm and make a lot of money?”
“You’re crazy as a loon,” declared Scoop, which is the kind of
bouquets he usually hands out when he gets excited. “The cat farm is
a pipe-dream. I thought so when the professor told us about it at the
depot. Like a boob, though, I let him kid me into thinking there was
something to it.”
“There _is_ something to it,” Peg defended. “Look how the cats are
coming in. Thirty-seven the first two days. I don’t see why the feline
rest farm has to be a failure just because they took the professor
away. Why can’t _we_ run it? No one has a better right.”
Like Peg, I was thinking to myself it would be fine if we could keep
on running the cat farm and make it pay. He thought we could do it. I
thought so, too. There was Lady Victoria, the five-hundred-dollar,
rose-colored cat. The fact that the woman who owned the cat had sent
us ten dollars was a pretty good indication that the feline rest farm
was a success. I told Scoop my thoughts and he looked more cheerful.
We talked it over and decided to stick and see the thing through.
We hoped, though, that no more cats would arrive for a week or two.
Thirty-seven was all we could manage to care for at the present time.
We hoped, too, that the people who had shipped us the cats would begin
sending in their money. Having only the ten-dollar bill as working
capital gave us an uncertain feeling. To run a business right a fellow
needs plenty of capital. I’ve heard Dad say so. I realized now how
necessary capital is.
Red happened to be down town when the guards took the professor away.
Presently he tumbled into the mill all out of breath. He was so excited
he could hardly talk.
“The baggage man--wants us to bring a truck--to the depot,” he panted.
“What for?” I inquired.
“To take away the cats that came in on the two-thirty. He says there’s
five crates.”
Scoop gave a gasp.
“Five crates?” he repeated dully.
“Yes, five crates,” said Red. “From the way they’re packed in I guess
there must be at least ten cats in each crate.”
Scoop clawed at his hair.
“O-h-h-h-h!” he groaned. “Five more crates of cats. Cats, cats, cats!
Nothing but cats. Catch me, fellows, I’m going to faint.”
Red was stepping around in high feather.
“Gee, fellows,” he enthused, “ain’t things working out slick? This
makes nearly a hundred cats, and it’s only the second day after we
opened up for business. That’s a hundred dollars a week! Hot dog! I
guess we’ll be able to start a bank, what?” Here he paused and glanced
around, a questioning look in his eyes. “Where’s the professor?” he
wanted to know.
We told him.
“Now that you know what we’re up against,” Scoop said dismally, “maybe
you’ll let me faint like I wanted to.”
He was fooling, of course. No one had any intentions of fainting--not
with one hundred cats on our hands. Cats aren’t very husky when it
comes to size, but they eat something, and just what that something was
going to be was pretty much of an uncertainty in my mind.
We were preparing to leave the mill when one of the baggage man’s kids
thrust his tousled head in through the door and told us his pa wanted
us to get busy and take the cats away from the depot.
“Two more crates just come in,” he told us, acting like he wanted to be
patted on the back for bringing us good news.
Scoop went wild-eyed.
“You mean there’s _seven_ crates instead of five?” he yipped.
“Yep,” grinned the kid. “And I bet you’ll be tickled when you see the
way they’re packed in the last two crates.”
Scoop shoved the kid through the doorway. Then he sat down on a cat box
and laughed.
“A hundred cats,” he gurgled. “Gee-miny crickets! It’s funny, fellows.
It’s a scream.”
“Let’s hope the people who own the hundred cats don’t forget to send us
plenty of money,” spoke up Peg. “I guess it won’t be such a laughing
matter if the owners of the cats misplace our address.”
“I’ll say it won’t,” I agreed.
Before night everybody in Tutter knew about the guards taking the
professor back to the infirmary. It seemed to strike a great many
people as being a huge joke--the fact that he was crazy and had left
the feline rest farm on our hands. I guess, too, that nearly everybody
in town knew about the seven crates of cats at the depot. When we went
down to get the cats, driving Dad’s brickyard dump cart, there was
quite a crowd at the depot. As we drove up the people stood along the
edge of the platform and grinned at us and offered foolish suggestions.
The crates containing the cats were piled on the platform and we could
hear the cats yowling when we got within a hundred yards of the depot.
The baggage man wasn’t very friendly.
“You kids certainly are doin’ a thrivin’ business with your cat farm,”
he growled. “I’m goin’ to look for a new job if this keeps up. I can
stand crated chickens and dogs and pet pigs and even a nanny goat. But
deliver me from crated cats! Listen to ’em scrap! That’s the way they
go it all the time. I wish they’d kill each other. There’s cat fur all
over the depot.”
But he came down from his high horse long enough to help us load the
cats into the dump cart. Then we started back toward the old mill.
When we passed down Main Street we attracted a lot of attention. The
people stood on the edge of the sidewalk and laughed. They wanted to
know where we were going to put on the circus--and did we have any
elephants, or just cats?
Maybe you never saw a dump cart. It is a one-horse outfit on two
wheels. The body is balanced on the axle and by pulling a lever near
the driver’s seat the front end of the box tips up letting the contents
of the cart slide out at the back. Dad uses the car for dumping scrap
brick onto the refuse pile near the canal.
When we turned into Grove Street Red Meyers tried to act smart and
balance himself on the top cat crate. He’s always up to monkeyshines
like that. I yelled at him to sit down and quit jiggling the cart, but
he pretended not to hear me.
“Lookit, gang!” he yipped, standing on one foot. “‘Tilly Tinker,’” he
cried, and swayed his body back and forth in imitation of the wooden
nursery toy you frequently see in store windows.
I don’t know how the accident happened. Maybe I struck the dumping
lever with my elbow when I turned in my seat to yell at Red. Anyway the
hind part of the cart took a sudden dip and there was “Tilly Tinker” in
the middle of the dusty street with seven crates of yowling cats piled
on top of him.
I don’t know who made the most racket, Red or the cats. It was funny.
When he crawled from under the pile of crated cats and found us
laughing he wanted to fight the three of us.
Then Peg yelled:
“The cats, fellows! One of the crates is busted,” and he jumped out of
the cart and made a wild grab at a pair of furry tails. In less than
seven seconds the street seemed full of scampering cats. They beat it
in a dozen directions. We tried to catch all of them but it was a hard
job. Maybe six or eight got away from us. I don’t know.
Peg likes to tease Red. I never suspected, though, that he was starting
a joke when he said:
“Say, Red, there’s one of the cats over on Miss Prindle’s front porch.
I bet you can’t catch it.”
“I bet I can,” bragged Red.
“Your feet are too big,” said Peg. “You move around like a steam
roller. By the time you get within ten feet of the porch the cat will
be in the next block.”
“Is that so!” snorted Red. Hitching up his pants he started across the
street.
Pretty soon he came to the porch steps. The cat seemed to be sleeping
and didn’t notice him. That was funny, I thought. Then I tumbled to the
fact that it was Miss Prindle’s pet Angora.
Sneaking up the porch steps on his hands and knees, Red made a lunge
for the cat. It gave an awful yowl. Miss Prindle appeared in the
doorway with a broom. I suspect she came to the porch to do some
sweeping. She forgot all about sweeping, though, when she saw Red
hanging to her cat. Down came the broom on his head.
“Tryin’ to steal my Tabby to put in your silly cat farm, are you?” she
cried, getting in another lick. “I’ll teach you to keep out of my yard
and leave my cat alone. Take that and that,” and poor Red got a couple
more husky whacks.
He limped back to the dump cart rubbing his head.
“I’ll get even with her,” he growled, glaring in Miss Prindle’s
direction. Then he saw us grinning and tumbled to the fact that Peg had
put up a job on him. “Yes,” he gritted, scowling at Peg, “and I know
some one else I’ll get even with, too.”
When we reached the old mill we took the cats out of the crates and
shut them in the boxes we had fixed up. We counted seventy-nine. As we
already had thirty-seven before this last bunch arrived, our total was
now one hundred and sixteen. We had to double up with a number of the
cats and put two in a box.
When the cats were taken care of we sat down to talk things over,
because, as Scoop pointed out, the situation was getting complicated
to say the least. Twice that afternoon we had stopped in at the post
office, hoping more money would arrive in the mail. Each time the post
office box that Professor Stoner had rented was empty.
“So far,” said Scoop, “with the exception of the ten-dollar bill it has
been all cats and no coin. Maybe you can tell me what we are going to
do if the cats keep on coming and the money doesn’t show up.”
“I think the money’ll come pretty soon,” Red said hopefully. “We can’t
expect everything to happen the first day or two.”
“The advertisement in the Chicago newspaper didn’t say that people had
to pay in advance,” I reminded. “Maybe the owners of the cats expect us
to send them a bill at the end of each week, like the storekeepers do.”
“Who are we going to send the bills to?” said Scoop, acting like he
wanted to corner me.
“To the owners of the cats,” I said.
“Who are they?” he followed up.
Well, I couldn’t answer that. It is a fact that we didn’t have the
names and addresses of the people who had sent us the cats. I knew it
as well as Scoop did, but I had let it slip my mind.
There was a brief silence.
“I’m beginning to think,” said Scoop, “that there is some joke about
these cats. Every one around here thinks so. Anyway, if the coin
doesn’t begin to come in pretty soon, or if we don’t get some letters
from the owners of the cats, I guess we won’t be in doubt as to whether
or not it’s a joke.”
Peg had a thoughtful look.
“If it _does_ turn out that way,” he put in, “what’ll we do with the
cats?”
Red giggled.
“That’s easy,” he cried. “We’ll turn ’em loose.”
“Oh, no you won’t,” Scoop said quickly. “That’s one thing we _can’t_
do.”
“Why not?” said Red.
“Dad told me this noon,” said Scoop, “that Bill Hadley told him if we
tried turning the cats loose in Tutter he’d put us in the cooler.”
Bill Hadley is the Tutter cop. He’s a pretty good friend of ours, like
I wrote about in my whispering mummy book, but we knew if he told Mr.
Ellery he would put us in jail he’d stand by his word. When it comes to
enforcing the law Bill has no favorites.
“How did Bill come to tell your father that?” inquired Peg.
“Like I mentioned,” said Scoop, “everybody around here seems to think
this rest farm is a joke. The people expect that sooner or later we’ll
have to get rid of the cats. I guess they told Bill to keep an eye on
us so the cats wouldn’t be turned loose on them. Safety first, kind of.”
Peg giggled, his big mouth stretching from ear to ear.
“Let’s sell ’em to the butcher,” he suggested. “They ought to make
fine sausages. We’ll help the butcher fix up a dandy advertisement
to go in his window: ‘Try our famous feline sausages. Made from
carefully-selected, hand-picked specimens, secured from Professor
Stoner’s celebrated Feline Rest Farm.’ How’s that? Pretty nifty, eh?”
I continued the nonsense by suggesting:
“Or we can have a rummage sale and get rid of ’em that way.”
“Why not form a company,” grinned Red. “‘The Tutter Mouse Exterminator
Company, Limited.’ We can rent the cats out in gangs at so much a day.”
Scoop gave a disgusted grunt and sprang to his feet.
“You’re getting worse and worse. As idea artists you’d make
second-class bricklayers. I move we adjourn till some one gets a real
hunch.”
We started for town. A short distance from the old mill we met the
baggage man’s boy coming on the run.
“Say, Scoop,” he yelled, before he reached us.
“Say it,” Scoop said without enthusiasm.
“There’s two more crates at the depot.”
Right away I thought of the five-hundred-dollar, rose-colored cat.
“Come on,” I yipped. “Let’s beat it for the depot. Maybe Lady
Victoria’s arrived.”
“Nix,” said Scoop, “there’s been no train from Chicago.”
The boy shook his head.
“No,” said he, “these cats came from Peoria.”
Scoop looked like he had a pain in his stomach.
“Where’ll they come from next?” he wailed.