Jerry Todd and the rose-colored cat

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:

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.