Then he gets up, quick, looks over his shoulder at nothing, and shoots down the stairs to the cellar. I take a look to see where he’s going, and he is pacing slowly toward the backyard, head down, a tiger on the prowl. I figure I’ll sit in the sun and finish my science-fiction magazine before I go after him.
When I do, he’s not in sight, and the janitor tells me he jumped up on the wall and probably down into one of the other yards. I look around a while and call, but he’s not in sight, and I go up to lunch. Along toward evening Cat scratches at the door and comes in, as if he’d done it all his life.
This gets to be a routine. Sometimes he doesn’t even come home at night, and he’s sitting on the doormat when I get the milk in the morning, looking offended.
“Is it my fault you stayed out all night?” I ask him.
He sticks his tail straight up and marches down the hall to the kitchen, where he waits for me to open the milk and dish out the cat food. Then he goes to bed.
One morning he’s not there when I open the door, and he still hasn’t showed up when I get back from school. I get worried and go down to talk to Butch.
“Wa-a-l,” says Butch, “sometimes that cat sit and talk to me a little, but most times he go on over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk to his lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of buildings put on heat and closed up their basements. Maybe he got locked in somewheres.”
“Which building’s his friend live in?” I ask.
“Forty-six, the big one. His friend’s a little black-and-white cat, sort of belongs to the night man over there. He feeds her.”
I go around to Twenty-first Street and case Forty-six, which is a pretty fair-looking building with a striped awning and a doorman who saunters out front and looks around every few minutes.