CHAPTER II

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