A CALICO CAT
FRANKLIN did not go home after Weejums disappeared, but wandered around the neighborhood, wondering what he should do if she did not come back. “What do you mean by chasing my sister’s cat?” he asked fiercely of one of the small boys who followed him.
“Aw—go long! You was chasin’ it yourself. Tie up your teeth!” was the insulting reply. And Franklin realized that he could never make them believe anything else. Then he began to wonder if there was not a certain amount of truth in what the boy had said. To be sure, he had started out to rescue Weejums and bring her home, but there had been a strange and terrible joy in his heart, when that seventeenth dog joined the hunt, and fell over all the others.
“Pshaw! all cats come home,” he thought. “She’ll find her way back all right. But rabbits are different.”
He ground his heel angrily into the gravel, and thought of Stamper; but somehow he could not work himself up into as bad a temper as he had before. He could not imagine what would become of Eunice if Weejums were lost.
“But cats always come home,” he thought again. “P’r’aps she’ll be there when I get back.”
He had not noticed in what direction he was walking, and suddenly found himself quite far down-town, opposite the bird store. There was a new assortment of very wobbly fox terrier puppies in the window, and he could not resist sauntering up to examine them. But almost immediately he wheeled around, and walked off very fast without looking back, for in the bird store he had seen his mother and Eunice.
They were buying a rabbit. He had seen the man holding up one of the old store rabbits, who was kicking dreadfully, and whacking the white-mouse cage with his hind legs.
Franklin knew that they charged a dollar and a quarter for this rabbit, and that he was not worth it.