When Mr. Connor first moved up on the hill, Jim used to shoot a cottontail almost every day, and some days he shot two. The rabbits, however, are shyer than the gophers; when they find out that they get shot as soon as they are seen, and that these men who shoot them have built houses and mean to stay, they will gradually desert their burrows and move away to new homes.
But the gopher is not so afraid. He lives down in the ground, and can work in the dark as well as in the light; and he likes roots just as well as he likes the stems above ground; so as long as he stays in his cellar houses, he is hard to reach.
The gopher is a pretty little creature, with a striped back,—almost as pretty as a chipmonk. It seems a great pity to have to kill them all off; but there is no help for it; fruit-trees and gophers cannot live in the same place.
Soon after Mr. Connor moved into his new house, he had a present of a big cat from the Mexican woman who sold him milk.
She said to Jim one day, "Have you got a cat in your house yet?"
"No," said Jim. "Mr. George does not like cats."
"No matter," said she, "you have got to have one. The gophers and squirrels in this country are a great deal worse than rats and mice. They'll come right into your kitchen and cellar, if your back is turned a minute, and eat you out of house and home. I'll give you a splendid cat. She's a good hunter. I've got more cats than I know what to do with."
So she presented Jim with a fine, big black and white cat; and Jim named the cat "Mexican," because a Mexican woman gave her to him.
The first thing Mexican did, after getting herself established in her new home in the woodpile, was to have a litter of kittens, six of them. The next thing she did, as soon as they got big enough to eat meat, was to go out hunting for food for them; and one day, as Mr. Connor was riding up the hill, he saw her running into the woodpile, with a big fat gopher in her mouth.
"Ha!" thought Mr. Connor to himself. "There's an idea! If one cat will kill one gopher in a day, twenty cats would kill twenty gophers in a day! I'll get twenty cats, and keep them just to hunt gophers. They'll clear the place out quicker than poison, or traps, or drowning."