“We should like your advice on matters which are most important,” he said. “First of all, we shall be cold here in the winter. How shall we warm our houses?”
Rob considered a few moments, while Lois looked at him anxiously; for the life of her she could not see how it was to be done.
“I think,” said Rob, looking up, suddenly, with a bright smile of relief, “I think you had better move all your houses together and take down one wall of each, so that they will be turned into one big house. Then, I think, you ought to have a chimney right in the middle of that one big house and keep a fire in it, and let everybody in the city live in that house.”
“Wouldn’t it be hard to move all these houses?” asked Lois.
“Not a bit,” said the black and white cat who had helped to carry Dolly Varden on the day the pilgrims had come to the site of the present city; he was the head of the carpenter cats. “Not a bit, ma’am. We’d just as soon move them houses as not—there ain’t no work doin’ now, and we carpenters hate bein’ idle. Them houses was built so quick you wouldn’t think it, and they can be moved as easy as catchin’ a small mouse. The boy’s got a good notion; I reccymend we take it up.”
“The question arises,” began Tommy Traddles, his English sounding more elegant than ever after the slips of the carpenter cat, who had been only a street waif, “whether we could manage the fire. We could easily feed it, but could we build it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Rob, enthusiastically. “I’ll get a friend of my father’s who has lived among all sorts of people in Africa and India, and—and—oh, all sorts of queer people—Eskimos, I guess, and Alaska Indians, I’ll get him to tell me how to build a clay chimney and strike a fire from flint. Then I’ll come and build your chimney myself, and I’ll let the fire go out and build it up new every week when I come, so all you’ll have to do is to feed it. But I’ll teach you how to rub stones together to get fire,—when I’ve learned myself,—and if it ever happened that it went out, you could light another. You mightn’t have matches, but you can always get stones. I guess you’ll be all right that way.”
“More than all right,” said Tommy Traddles, with a look of relief on his part, for he had been worried over the approach of cold weather and the prospect of the Purrers having no heat. All the Purrers applauded Rob’s wisdom and noble promise to help them, and Ban-Ban’s fur stood up with pride, while he looked an “I-told-you-so” to the assembled cats.
“We can bring out lots of woollen things and some wadding,” said Lois, longing to be useful too.
Madam Laura smiled at her, understanding her feeling. “My dear little girl,” she said, “you will do a great deal more than bring us warm things; we shall depend upon you for more than you dream of now.” And Lois was comforted even while she remembered how queer it was to be comforted in this grandmotherly way by a particularly small cat.