Ban-ban and Kiku-san were walking arm and arm, talking earnestly. It had rained, and the streets were muddy, so they had linked the right paw of one through the left arm of the other, and each carried his tail looped over his remaining elbow, to keep it perfectly dry.
“There’s no use in my trying to fight it off any longer, Bannie,” Kiku was saying, earnestly. “I want to go home. I’m not needed here; the city is able to hold its own now; but, if it weren’t, I could be spared from it—I’m not the go-ahead kind which is useful in public affairs. I’ve got to see Lois. I’m sure she hasn’t any other cat to take my place, and worries about me still. I feel as if I couldn’t stay in my fur, I long so to cuddle down in her arms and be petted.” Kiku-san’s voice broke into the saddest mew as he ended, and Ban-Ban looked serious.
“I don’t mind telling you, Kiku, though I wouldn’t have any one else in Purrington know it for the world, but I feel pretty much the same way,” he said. “Of course I’m the sort who can cut up capers, no matter what happens, but I want to see Rob, and I want to see him badly. I’m as sure that he cries nights over me as if I saw him. He thinks I’ve been killed, or got lost where I’ll suffer for food, and be abused—I know Rob! There are times when I wonder if I did right to leave him, but when I see how happy all these poor cats are in Purrington, and how well everything is going, and remember that they had no home, and no kindness until we led them here, then I feel certain again that it was more than right to leave our home. But—to be honest—now the work is done, I want to go back again, just for a visit, anyway.”
“It won’t be a visit for me,” said Kiku-san, with the decision with which very gentle people usually surprise their friends when they are once aroused. “I’m going home to Lois, and I’m going to stay there. I won’t be contented, though, Ban, if I have to leave you behind: come with me!”
“Now wait a bit, Kiku-san, and we’ll try to manage it,” said Ban-Ban. “I don’t want to have the other Purrers feel as though I had deserted them. I’m not much good at patient waiting myself,—that’s more in your line,—but I see that there may something turn up that will let us go back—for a visit; I don’t dare promise to stay—without our seeming to run away. You see, I feel responsible for the Purrers and Purrington, because this city was my idea in the first place.”
“I’ll wait a little longer, then,” sighed Kiku-san. “But it can’t be very long; I can’t stand it.”
He did not have to wait long. When anything is to be, there is always a way made for it.
It began to be whispered through Purrington that, after all, cats were not quite fitted to live entirely without human help. The houses that the cat carpenters had put up were not warm enough for winter; there were several matters on which the Purrers felt the need of help and advice. “If there were any human beings whom we could get to come here, straighten out these trifles, and act as our friends and advisers, who could be trusted to go between Purrington and the human city, looking after us and never betraying us, we should be better off,” they said.
The question was where to find such friends, how to bring them to Purrington, and whom to select for such an important trust.