“Trust me! I will get out as I came—by the window.”
“I did not know there was a fire escape by the window,” said Stubby.
“There isn’t. I came up on the food basket.” And then Button told him how he had come up in the basket and nearly scared a nurse to death.
“But you can’t go down that way because there is no one here to let the basket down,” objected Stubby.
“I don’t need any basket to go down in. All I need is the rope, and as it is fastened to the wall I will just have to slide down it.”
“Oh, Button, but you are a smart cat! You should have been born a man, not a cat. If you had, the world would have heard of wonderful things you had done, I am sure.”
“If you wish I had been born a man, I wish the three of us had. Wouldn’t Billy have made a splendid brigadier general, while you would have made a dandy lieutenant!”
“S-s-s-s-sh-h-h! I hear the nurse coming. Scoot! Drop out of bed on the side nearest the wall and run under the beds until you are near the window,” advised Stubby.
The nurse was walking down the aisle of the ward that faced the window when the moon came out from under a cloud and shone straight into the room. And she saw not only the moon, but a big black cat as it jumped up on the window sill. She shut her eyes, looked again and again, and the cat had disappeared!
“It must be the same cat that Nurse Mollie saw, and now it has disappeared again as completely as it did when she saw it. She got one glimpse and it was gone. I got another, and it faded in thin air. Heavens! We must be going to be bombarded for black cats bring bad luck, they say, and this cat has come to warn us. I’ll just run to the window and see if I can’t see it. It could not jump out of the window because it is too high from the ground, and it isn’t in this room, and cats can’t fly, so where is it?”