But at this point the barn cat screwed up his torn nose with a peculiarly threatening effect, and gave one long slow spit, most terrible to hear and behold. Eunice dropped her saucer of milk and fled. She had not supposed that she would ever live to hear a cat speak to her like that.
He did not call on Weejums after this, excepting at night, when everybody else was in bed; and Eunice wrote a song about him that she and Kenneth used to sing as a duet. Sometimes one took the alto part, and sometimes the other, but in any case the cat always fled. He told Weejums that it was because it made him feel so hollow.
I hear the voice of a poor, poor
cat, His voice is thin as a thin, thin
slat. I fear his stom-ach is just like
that, An emp-ty place in the poor, poor cat.
But one night Torn-nose relieved his emptiness by eating one of Veatra Peck’s chickens.
“I’ll shoot that old barn cat, you see if I don’t!” Franklin said furiously. But Mrs. Wood said that it would mean one less chicken for her to chase. To tell the truth, she was getting rather tired of them, for every day, while Franklin was at school, they caused misunderstandings with the neighbors.
“If they’d only wait till he gets home,” she said; “but they commit all their worst outrages in the morning.”
No sooner would she sit down to her sewing than there would come a polite ring at the door-bell, and a certain Mr. Teechout would say, “Pardon me, madam, but your fowls are trespassing on my strawberry beds.”