“Oh, some one had more cats than they wanted, so they turned it loose, down by the brook,” said Jud. “It’s a mean trick and if I ever caught a person doing it, I wouldn’t waste a second giving him a piece of my mind.”
Meg stared at the forlorn white kitten gravely.
“You don’t suppose it belongs to the man who washed the shirt, do you?” she suggested earnestly.
Linda laughed. She was busily wrapping up the cat in tissue paper––of all things!––because she happened to have a big wad of it in her basket.
“There!” she said, handing the astonished kitten to Meg. “I can’t bear to have dirty things around me––you carry her like that and as soon as we get home I’ll wash her. If the cat did belong to the man whose shirt I mended, I suppose you’d feel like going back and cutting the buttons off, eh, Meg?”
Meg blushed a little.
“No-o, I wouldn’t do that,” she replied slowly, “but next time I wouldn’t bother.”
However, Jud said that he didn’t think a man who had to wash his clothes in the brook and dry them on a bush had any cats.
“What are you going to call your find, Meg?” asked Jud when they were riding home at half-past four, Peter eating his sandwiches gratefully.