THE NEW CAT
Meg could not fall flat, for Jud had hold of her hand, but she did
drop her carefully held skirt. There was a splash, a startled "Meow!"
and a shriek from Meg.
"Don't let it drown!" she cried. "Jud, catch it, quick!"
If Meg had planned to surprise the twins, she could not have managed
better. They couldn't quite see what was going on, but they knew that
something had happened.
"What is it?" they called. "Can we come in, Jud, can't we come see?"
Jud made a quick scoop with his hand and brought out the miserable,
clawing, spitting little kitten.
"You stay where you are!" he ordered the twins. "Say, where'll I put
this?" he asked helplessly, turning to Meg.
She held up her skirt again and he dropped the kitten in it, since
that seemed to be the only place, and as Meg afterward said she was "a
little damp" from the cat's splash and more water wouldn't hurt.
Then Jud took hold of Meg's hand more firmly and Bobby's, too, and
they managed to reach the opposite bank without any more mishaps.
"What is it? What is it?" Dot and Twaddles begged, running up and down
madly. "Did you find something, Meg? Did you see the buttons on the
shirt? Did the man come and ask you who took it?"
"We didn't see anybody," said Bobby, who felt it was his duty to
answer this flood of questions. "I don't believe the man lives very
near, because we didn't see any house. But Meg found something."
By this time Aunt Polly and Linda had come down to the brook, to see
what was making the twins more excited than usual.
"Meg found something!" Dot told Aunt Polly.
"Did you, dear?" asked Aunt Polly, smiling. "Don't tell me it is
another shirt, Meg."
Meg stepped back and faced the group dramatically.
"It's a cat!" she said, and held her "find" up for them to see.
To her amazement, Linda and Jud went off into fits of laughter and
even Aunt Polly seemed to be trying not to smile.
"I don't see anything funny," Meg announced stiffly. "It's a poor
little almost dead cat. Bobby and I found it down the brook, hanging
on a tree and afraid to climb off."
"Why, the poor little thing!" said Aunt Polly with ready sympathy. "We
must take it home and feed it, Meg."
"I'm only laughing," Linda explained, wiping her eyes, "because it is
such a distressed-looking cat, Meg. It's so dirty and so little and
so--so mad!" she finished as the cat humped up its back and spit at
Twaddles who tried to stroke it.
"Stray kittens don't make friends very readily," said kind Aunt Polly.
"They think everyone is their enemy, till proved otherwise. We must
teach your kitten, Meg, that at Brookside Farm we like kitty cats."
"Where do you suppose it came from?" Bobby asked.
"Oh, some one had more cats than they wanted, so they turned it loose,
down by the brook," said Jud. "It's a mean trick and if I ever caught
a person doing it, I wouldn't waste a second giving him a piece of my
mind."
Meg stared at the forlorn white kitten gravely.
"You don't suppose it belongs to the man who washed the shirt, do
you?" she suggested earnestly.
Linda laughed. She was busily wrapping up the cat in tissue paper--of
all things!--because she happened to have a big wad of it in her
basket.
"There!" she said, handing the astonished kitten to Meg. "I can't bear
to have dirty things around me--you carry her like that and as soon as
we get home I'll wash her. If the cat did belong to the man whose
shirt I mended, I suppose you'd feel like going back and cutting the
buttons off, eh, Meg?"
Meg blushed a little.
"No-o, I wouldn't do that," she replied slowly, "but next time I
wouldn't bother."
However, Jud said that he didn't think a man who had to wash his
clothes in the brook and dry them on a bush had any cats.
"What are you going to call your find, Meg?" asked Jud when they
were riding home at half-past four, Peter eating his sandwiches
gratefully.
"Shirt," Meg answered placidly. "What are you laughing at? It's white,
like the shirt we found, and if it hadn't been for the shirt we
wouldn't have found the kitten at all and it might have fallen into
the water and been drowned."
And in spite of some teasing and much joking, Meg continued to call
the stray kitten "Shirt." True to her word, Linda washed the little
creature and when its fur dried it proved to be very pretty, soft and
silky. The kitty had blue eyes and by the time it was a full-grown
cat, Aunt Polly was immensely proud of it.
For Shirt lived at Brookside Farm and did not go with the four little
Blossoms when they went home to Oak Hill. Aunt Polly said Poots would
miss him and that cats didn't like to change their homes, anyway, and
Meg knew this to be true. And every year, at Christmas time, Meg
remembered to send Shirt a Christmas present and when she came to
visit Aunt Polly, he always seemed to know her.
The week of rain which Aunt Polly had predicted and which had led her
to hasten the picnic, arrived two or three days after the adventure in
the brook. The exceedingly practical Meg remarked at the breakfast
table, the first rainy morning, that she didn't care if it did
rain--Shirt was safe in a dry place and the man had had plenty of time
to get his wash dry and take it in off the bush.
"I wonder what he said when he saw the buttons," speculated Dot.
But this was one question that never received an answer, for the
children never saw the man who owned the shirt and they never heard
whether he was pleased to find his mending done or not.
"Maybe he thought the birds did it for him," said Twaddles helpfully
and was delighted when Jud told him that there was a bird called the
tailor bird.
"Then he did it," Twaddles declared, and when Dot pointed out that
they had seen Linda doing the work, Twaddles explained that he meant
the man would think the tailor bird had done it.
It was talk like this between the twins that made Jud say it gave him
a headache if he listened too long.
"We haven't had a rain like this in a long time," said Aunt Polly,
glancing out of the dining-room window at the dripping leaves.
"Not since we lost the raft," Bobby reminded her.
"I wonder if we'll ever find that," said Meg for the fortieth time.
"If I were you," Aunt Polly announced briskly, "I'd think up the
nicest thing to do for a rainy day and have just as much fun as I
could."
"Let's go out in the barn," suggested Twaddles.
"We could see what Jud is doing," Dot chimed in.
"He's mending the corn shelter," said Bobby, who usually knew what was
going on at the farm.
"I think it would be fun to play lighthouse in the barn and take our
lunch and stay all day," Meg declared, having thought of this while
the others were talking.
None of them knew what the lighthouse game might be, but it sounded
new and exciting. Aunt Polly said she didn't see why they couldn't
have a picnic in the barn as well as outdoors and she promised to help
Linda put up a lunch for them.
"Only remember not to bother Jud, if he is busy," she cautioned them.
The four little Blossoms knew how to run "between the drops" and as
soon as their lunch was packed, they kissed Aunt Polly and started for
the barn at breakneck speed. Flushed and breathless and hardly wet at
all, they burst into the barn and told Jud, who was busy on the main
floor, that they were going to have another picnic.
"You do manage to have a good time, all right," he said approvingly.
"Where are you going to play?"
They looked at Meg. It was her game and she was the only one who knew
the best place to go.
"We have to play in the loft," directed Meg. "We're going to live in a
lighthouse, Jud, and pull things up and down."
Jud did not understand at first and when she told him, he said that
lighthouse keepers did not live at the top of the lighthouse and pull
things up, but instead they lived in a neat little house built on the
ground, like other houses, and climbed the tall stairs to take care of
the light.
"Well, I think it would be more fun to live up high," said Meg, and
Jud said that was the best of a "pretend" play. You could do it to
suit yourself.
The four children scrambled up the loft ladder--practice had made this
once difficult feat easy for them--and for a half hour jumped about
in the clean, sweet hay, forgetting their game. The smooth, slippery
hay, piled in such masses, never failed to fascinate them.
"Now let's play lighthouse," suggested Meg, when Twaddles had come
down rather hard on his nose and was trying not to cry. "First thing
we need is a basket and rope."
They found a basket Jud said they might take and he got a piece of
rope for them. Then they argued about staying down on the floor of the
barn to put things in the basket for, of course, each one wanted to
pull the basket up; that was the interesting part.
"Take turns," Bobby advised. "I'll stay down first, and let Meg pull
up first, because she thought of this game."
So Meg ran up the ladder and Bobby put in the lunch box and she pulled
and tugged and at last succeeded in pulling the basket up to the
loft.