"You—you won't hurt the kittens?"
"Oh no, Miz Harris! 'Course not! Why would I hurt 'em when I told the Mister I'd take 'em?"
"Here's your money."
"Thankee."
Luke Trull tied the mouth of the gunny sack, slung it over the saddle horn, and swung expertly into the saddle. The horse broke into a fast walk and the gunny sack bobbed back and forth in cadence with the horse's movements. Paws spread, claws extended, Frosty steadied himself by holding onto the sacking. One of the gray kittens whimpered plaintively. Rigid with uncertainty, the second merely stared. Frosty paid his brothers not the slightest attention.
He could smell nothing, see nothing except dim light that filtered through the gunny sack's coarse weave, and he heard little but the measured clomp-clomp of the horse's hooves. Since he could know nothing whatever of what lay about him, or what might happen next, he couldn't possibly plan any intelligent course of action or know how to cope with the next problem that arose. He must be ready for anything and he was.
Though he knew no fear, his nerves were taut as a blown-up balloon. From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, no tiny part of him was even slightly relaxed. Just so, provision is made for all cats that find themselves in serious and uncertain situations. Frosty, and to a lesser extent the gray kittens, were ready to fly in any direction or to do instantly whatever the next second, the next minute, the next hour, or any elapsed time, might have them do.
They did not bob around as puppies would have because each had all four claws firmly fixed in the sacking and, in a very real way, even while they were together, they remained apart. Though on occasion several cats will cooperate to do what one alone cannot do, theirs is not the pack instinct of dogs and wolves. Intelligent enough to work with others when the situation demands it, they are too highly individualized to look to any one leader and too smart ever completely to trust their own fate to anything except themselves.
The gray kitten that had mewed before, called a second time. It was not a cry of fear, but one of appeal. Until now, the kitten's world had consisted of the shed, of daytime forays into the yard, of all the food it could eat and of unfailingly gentle treatment at the hands of human beings. The desperate kitten wanted only to be back in the familiar world from which it had been so rudely torn.
Far more intelligent and advanced than either of the gray kittens, Frosty gave himself wholly to facing things as they were, with no vain lamentations for what had been. Still able to smell only the dusty sack, to see little and to hear only the horse's hoofbeats, he kept every sense alert. Thus he knew when they left the road and started climbing a mountain path. The little dust bombs that had been exploding under the horse's feet no longer floated upwards. Metal-shod hooves rang on rocks and boulders and the air was cleaner.