Jerry Todd and the rose-colored cat

Following the discovery of the empty cat box we lighted a lantern and searched the room, peering into all the shadowy nooks and crevices.

“Now we are in a fix,” groaned Scoop, when it became plain to us that Mrs. Kepple’s five-hundred-dollar cat had positively disappeared from the old mill.

Red set the lantern on a box and hitched at his belt.

“Well?” he said shortly, meaning what should we do next in an attempt to locate the rose-colored cat.

About to shape a reply, I was cut short by an ear-splitting yowl. Never in all my life had I heard a yowl so chock-full of quivering terror. It appeared to come from the lower floor of the mill. Without a doubt some cat near us was in serious trouble.

Scoop leaped into action.

“Lady Victoria, I bet,” he cried. “Quick, fellows,” and taking the lantern he dashed through the doorway into the open. We were close on his heels as he rounded the corner of the mill and tumbled pell-mell down the slope to the lower door.

The yowling grew sharper when we entered the basement room. Guided by the sounds we soon located a yellow cat in one corner. It was Lady Victoria beyond a doubt, because the copper collar on the cat’s neck glistened dully in the lantern’s light. At a second glance we observed that the jaws of a rat trap had closed midway on the long tail.

When we released the cat it was plain to all of us that the tail bone was broken. Four inches of the tail’s tip end hung by the skin. A five-hundred-dollar cat with a broken tail! I could not doubt that the damaged tail put Lady Victoria forever out of the blue ribbon class, the same as a broken leg ends a racing horse’s track career. She might have been worth five hundred dollars when she was whole; but only a person with a wild imagination would argue that she was worth that amount of money with a bob tail. In the thought that we would be held responsible I felt sick and discouraged.

Returning to the upper room I replaced the cat in its box, handling it gently so as not to cause it unnecessary pain. The other fellows stood back of me looking on.

“Maybe,” said Red, “if we had some glue we could stick the tail in place and it would grow there. They do that with trees. Eh, Scoop?”

“Lady Victoria isn’t made of wood,” retorted Scoop.

“It might work,” persisted Red.

“Shucks!” snorted Scoop, giving the other a disgusted look.

Red got huffy, which is the easiest thing he can do.

“I suppose you know all about fixing broken cats—— I mean, fixing broken cat-tails—— I mean——” He clawed his hair. “Good night!” he fumbled. “I don’t know what I do mean.”

Peg snickered.

“Some one page the dingey wagon for Red Meyers,” he yipped.

Scoop pretended he was talking into a telephone.

“Is this the dingey house?” he inquired, putting a grave look on his face. “Very well, sir,” he added, “please send your hurry-up wagon to the Tutter Feline Rest Farm. Make it snappy. We have a red-headed lunatic here who wants to engage one of your padded parlors.”

“Shucks!” I put in. “Cut out the nonsense and do something for the cat.”

“What can we do?” said Peg.

“The tail ought to be bandaged up,” I said “and salve put on it to make it heal.”

Scoop yawned.

“We’ll do that to-morrow. Come on and let’s go to roost.”

It occurred to us that possibly the Stricker gang might return to the old mill under the thought that we were asleep, so we took turns standing guard. But nothing happened.

The following morning we finished repairing the cat boxes and then Peg went over to Mrs. Maloney’s house for the skimmed milk she had promised to save for us. When Red inspected the traps he found fourteen mice and two rats. This was hardly a taste for our big family of cats.

In dividing the mice and rats among the cats Scoop said we better feed them in groups, so we selected the white cats for the first feast. It was fun to watch the cats fight. One would grab a mouse and run with it, clawing and spitting at the cats pursuing it.

“If they were wise,” laughed Scoop, “they would work in pairs, one chewing the head and the other the hind feet. Then their scrapping would be confined to the final bite.”

“Which shows that you don’t know very much about cats,” I put in quickly.

He looked at me.

“A cat,” I added, “always starts eating a mouse at the head end, saving the tail till the last.”

“What’s the idea?” Scoop inquired.

“It uses the tail to pick its teeth with,” I grinned.

Here Peg came in with the milk and a sackful of cookies. We left Red to watch things and went home to breakfast. Afterwards I joined Scoop and Peg down town. They had stopped in at the post office but the cat farm box was empty as usual. I wasn’t surprised. Like the others I realized that with the exception of Lady Victoria the cats had been sent to us as a joke. I had persistently hoped, though, that a few dollars would show up. Our money was fast dwindling away.

Scoop had his pockets full of scissors and things.

“What’s the keyhole saw for?” I inquired, when we were hurrying along the path to the old mill.

“I’ll likely need it in performing the operation,” he grinned.

“What operation?” I inquired.

“Well,” he countered, “we’ve got to fix Lady Victoria’s damaged tail, haven’t we?”

I nodded.

“That’s the operation I mean.”

“And you expect to use those wire cutters and that saw on the cat?” I cornered, staring at him.

“It’s just as well to be prepared for emergencies,” was his offhand reply.

“Good night!” I cried, and promptly told him I was sorry for the poor cat.

Presently we arrived at the old mill. When Red saw the scissors and wire cutters he made us promise to delay the operation till he returned from breakfast.

“I don’t want to miss a thing,” he told us. Then he beat it for home.

Viewed in the morning sunlight, Lady Victoria seemed very much dejected and shy of pep. Before the accident she was one of the scrappiest cats in the mill. Now she crouched in a corner of her box like a forlorn, hunted thing.

In planning the operation Scoop told us the first step was to cut the skin that held the dangling tail to the stub. Under his directions we made an operating table of a box and flopped Lady Victoria onto her back. She clawed and spit. Red held to the front feet while I managed the hind pair. Peg stood around and criticized, handing the operating tools to Scoop as he called for them.

When everything was ready Scoop snipped the skin with the scissors and the cat doubled up like a jackknife.

“Steady now, fellows,” he cautioned. “I’ve got to examine the bone. Hand me that basin of water, Peg. Um—— Just as I thought. The bone is slivered.” Here he did something to the stub that caused the cat to double up a second time. “Don’t let her do that, fellows. Steady now. I want to saw the jagged bone.”

He ran the teeth of the saw across the end of Lady Victoria’s stub. In spite of all Red and I could do the cat squirmed under our grip and repeated the jackknife stunt.

Scoop ran his fingers through his hair in a thoughtful way. “Guess we’ll have to give her chloroform,” he decided.

“Will that fix the tail?” Red inquired quickly.

“It’ll put her to sleep,” explained Scoop. “Haven’t you heard how patients in hospitals are given chloroform when operations are being performed on them? As I understand it the chloroform makes them sleep through the operation and they don’t know what the doctors are doing to them.”

“Maybe it won’t work on a cat,” Red said doubtfully.

“Sure it will,” declared Scoop. Presently he added decisively: “Yes, we’ll have to give Lady Victoria chloroform. That’s the only way to do the job up proper. It hadn’t ought to take a great deal. Here’s a dime, Red. You’re a good runner. Suppose you beat it for the drug store and tell the clerk you want ten cents’ worth of chloroform. If he thinks you’re going to commit suicide, tell him about the cat.”

Red scowled.

“Gosh!” he complained. “I have to do all the running.” He took the dime, though, and started for town.

I guess chloroform is pretty expensive. Anyway, Red didn’t bring back more than a thimbleful. We figured there wasn’t enough in the bottle to make Lady Victoria sleep very long, so decided it would be best to give the chloroform to her in one dose.

“You’ll have to work fast,” Peg told Scoop.

The latter had a puzzled look on his face as he alternately squinted at the cat and chloroform bottle.

“Um— Which is the right way to give it to her?” he inquired. “Inside or outside?”

“Try it both ways,” I suggested.

He shook his head.

“Not enough chloroform,” he explained.

“I think you should let her smell of it,” said. Peg.

Acting on this suggestion, Scoop held the uncorked bottle close to Lady Victoria’s nose. Instead of putting her to sleep it started her to yowling.

“How long do I have to let her smell of it?” inquired Scoop, glancing up at Peg.

Red gave a laugh.

“I knew you fellows would be up against it when it came to using the chloroform,” he said.

Scoop straightened.

“Do you know how to do it?”

“Sure thing,” said Red. “I asked the man in the drug store.”

“What did he say?”

“You should put the chloroform on a cloth and hold the cloth over the cat’s nose and mouth. Then it will breathe the chloroform smell and go to sleep.”

Scoop followed these directions. In no time at all Lady Victoria stopped squirming. When she was perfectly limp Red and I released her feet.

“Gosh!” I cried. “She ain’t dead, is she?” She looked dead to me.

Scoop was visibly uncertain.

“Feel of her heart, Red, and see if it’s still beating. Naw, that isn’t the place to feel of. Here, let me do it.” There was a brief silence. “I guess she’s still breathing,” he told us. “I can feel something wiggle under the skin. Um— I’ll have to hurry with the operation or she’ll be coming to her senses before I get the tail fixed.”

Here he took the saw and brought it down across Lady Victoria’s stub. This time the cat didn’t double up. When the jagged bone end had been sawed off he took a file and smoothed the corners. Then he drew the skin down over the stub and tied a string around it. It gave the cat a puckered look. Applying salve, he completed the operation by bandaging the stub with strips of cloth torn from an old pillow case he had brought from home.

Straightening, he drew a deep breath.

“There,” he said proudly.

Lady Victoria looked queer with the bandage on her stub. We wondered how she would act when she recovered her senses.

A minute passed. Two minutes.

“Hadn’t she ought to be waking up pretty soon?” Peg inquired anxiously.

We looked at Red.

“I never asked the drug store clerk how to wake her up,” he confessed.

“Maybe we ought to fan her—like they do people who faint,” I suggested.

“Or sprinkle her with cold water,” Peg put in.

“We’ll try both,” decided Scoop. He sprinkled on the water while Peg and I did the fanning. This failed to do a bit of good. Lady Victoria lay through it all, perfectly motionless. I touched her and found that she was getting stiff.

By this time Scoop was thoroughly scared. His hands trembled as he felt up and down the cat’s sides to see if he could detect a heart action.

“Here’s a little bump,” he mumbled. “It’s either her heart or a button she’s swallowed. But it’s perfectly still,” he added in a hushed voice. He looked soberly into our faces. “Honest, fellows, I believe she’s dead.”

Dismay gripped us when we faced the fact that the five-hundred-dollar cat was really dead. The broken tail had been bad enough, but to have the cat expire on our home-made operating table was a thousand times worse. We realized now, when it was too late, that the operation was a crazy mistake. A cat with a damaged tail was better than no cat at all.

Scoop felt pretty cheap over the way he had bungled things. Collecting the keyhole saw and other operating tools he grimaced at us.

“The man who started the report that a cat has nine lives sure guessed wrong.” There was a brief silence as he cleaned the blade of his pocketknife. “Well, fellows,” he added, “I guess the only thing for us to do is to wait till the Chicago woman arrives at the sanitarium. We’ll tell her what happened and face the music.”

His reference to Lady Victoria’s owner filled me with vague alarm. I still believed there was some sort of mystery connected with the rose-colored cat. It had been sent to us under that queer name for a reason known only to its owner. Beyond all doubt the woman wanted the cat returned to her alive. What would happen to us when she learned that the cat was dead I could only imagine.

An hour later we buried Lady Victoria on the hilltop back of the old mill. As she was no ordinary cat we placed her in a small cheese box that had lost its strong smell and put some of Mrs. Maloney’s sunflowers on the grave. Red fixed up a marker on which he lettered:

Having thus paid our final respects to the rose-colored cat we went with Scoop to the brickyard office and listened while he telephoned to the sanitarium. The desk clerk informed him over the wire that Mrs. Kepple, having elected to motor to Tutter, was due to arrive at the sanitarium the following Monday morning.