“I will!” she said. “Not for sale, but to give away. Will one of you take this notice to the paper, while I take the kittens to camp for the night?”
“I’ll take the kittens home!” volunteered Helen, Louise and Nataly with a touching oneness of feeling.
Winona grinned. “Why, you very obliging people!” she said. “Please put them in a box with netting, then, so they can’t get away. I’ll go and advertise. I’m perfectly sure such good kittens as these will have lots of applications!”
Louise and Helen, each with a kitten, accompanied by Nataly, kittenless, went slowly campward in eloquent silence, while Winona sped back to the office of the village paper. So the next day an advertisement appeared in the Press:
Wanted, to find homes for two black kittens, nice purrers, good mousers. Can be separated. Apply Box 2, Press office, or at Camp Karonya, in person.
“I don’t care if they do laugh,” said Winona when she got back, to find Camp Karonya howling at her in rows. “If they laugh they’re more apt to remember, and come get the kittens. I’ll put them out of the way, poor little things, if nobody answers in a day or two.”
But—whether it was that cats who were “nice purrers” were a novelty, whether it is true that there’s a place for everything in this world if we could only get in touch with it—the very next day there were five applicants for those two black kittens. Indeed, Winona had great difficulty in holding onto Hike the Camp Cat, who had grown by now into a very presentable, if fat, Maltese kitten. People seemed to think that it was Winona’s duty to distribute cats as long as cats held out.
The only drawback was that for the rest of the time it was there the village with one accord used Camp Karonya as a clearing-house for its cats!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A couple of days later Winona took Florence and Puppums, and went exploring in the rowboat. Louise and Helen were very busy making a tree-house, but they promised to see that Hike the Camp Cat was looked after and no belated advertisement answerer got him.