“Scamp looked over him scornfully.”
Scamp looked him over scornfully, but Nugget’s spirit was gone; not a hair on his body rose the higher for the look.
“Next time I ask a cry-kitten to go fishin’ you’ll know it,” said Scamp, spitting.
“I wouldn’t go with you if you did,” said Nugget, not resenting being called “cry-kitten,” or pretending not to know for whom the name was intended. “I’ll never go anywhere with you again, Scamp Alloy, not anywhere, day or night. You make me bad; mamma says so, and it’s true, and now you make me frightened, and cold, and tired, and everything besides.”
Nugget put both paws before his face and mewed fast and furiously. He did not see Scamp nor the way he walked up close to him, still sidewise, with his ears back and his fur bristling. Nugget was sitting close to the river’s edge, too busy with his trouble to think of anything else. So, when Scamp got up to him, he was not ready for the hard blow that bad kitten gave him on the side of his bowed yellow head, and it sent him flying out almost into the middle of the stream.
Scamp was so frightened by what he had done that, after an instant, in which he stood staring at the circles in the water eddying around the spot where Nugget had sunk, he took to his heels and ran away for his life, leaving Nugget to get out or die as best he could.
While these dreadful things were happening by the river, the cats at home were having hours of misery over Nugget’s disappearance. When he did not come home to supper, and Dolly and Puttel reported that they had not seen him since school was dismissed, Bidelia’s heart misgave her. Ban-Ban and Kiku-san looked at Nugget’s delay from the brighter side, and comforted her by telling her it was caused by the kitten’s stopping to play, or getting into some comparatively harmless mischief, as kittens will. But after the supper, which Bidelia pushed away untasted, was over, even Ban-Ban and Kiku-san began to look serious, as Nugget did not turn up, and they each went out to inquire among their friends if any one had seen little Nugget.
When they came back without tidings of the lost kitten Bidelia sat down half-fainting, mewing piteously. Then she sprang up, took her little girls each by a paw, hurried them over to Madam Laura’s, and then rushed from house to house, calling upon all the Purrers of Purrington to turn out and search for her child.
It did not take long to learn from Alloy, his mother, that Scamp was missing, too. Alloy laughed at Bidelia for her fears, being quite accustomed to Scamp’s doing precisely what he pleased, coming home exactly when he was ready to come. But Bidelia was made only the more anxious at the thought that her little kitten should be missing in such bad company as Scamp’s.