“The bye-low is whistling his bye-low and bye-low again,” Peter said to herself with a murmur. “It is spring in the tall timbers and over the soft black lands. The hoo hoo and the biddywiddies come north to make a home again. The booblow blossoms put their cool white lips out into the blue mist. Every way I point my ears there is a bye-low whistling his bye-low and bye-low again. The spring in the timbers and black lands calls to the spring aching in my heart.”
Now the three whispering cats heard what Peter Potato Blossom Wishes was murmuring to herself about the spring heartache.
And Hannah, the yes-yes cat, answered yes-yes. Hannah More, the no-no cat, answered no-no. And Susquehannah, the stuttering cat, hesitated halfway between yes-yes and no-no.
And Peter rubbed their fur the right way, scratched them softly between the ears, and murmured to herself, “It is a don’t-care morning—I don’t care.”
And that morning her heart gave a hoist and a hist when she saw a speck of a blackbird spot far and high in the sky. Coming nearer it hummed, zoomed, hong whonged ... shut off the hong whong ... stop-locked and drop-locked ... and came down on the ground like a big easy bird with big wings stopped.
Hoom Slimmer slid out, wiped his hands on the oil rags, put a smear of axle grease on Peter’s chin, kissed her on the nose, patted her ears two pats—and then they went into the house and had a late breakfast which was her second breakfast and his first.
“I flew till I came to Pig’s Eye Valley in the Pickax Mountains,” Hoom Slimmer told her. “The pickax pigs there run digging with their pickax feet and their pickax snouts. They are lean, long-legged pigs with pockets all over, fat pocket ears ahead and fat pocket tails behind, and the pockets full of rusty dust. They dip their noses in their pockets, sniff their noses full of rusty dust, and sneeze the rusty dust in each other’s wrinkly, wriggly, wraggly faces.
“I took out a buzz shovel and scraper, pushed on the buzzer, and watched it dig and scrape out a city. The houses came to my ankles. The factories came to my knees. The top of the roof of the highest skyscraper came up to my nose.
“A spider ran out of a cellar. A book fell out of his mouth. It broke into rusty dust when I took hold of it. One page I saved. The reading on it said millions of people had read the book and millions more would read it.”
Hoom Slimmer reached into a pocket. He took out in his hand a railroad train with an engine hooked on ahead, and a smoking car, coaches and sleeping cars hooked on behind.