Pussy-Cat Town

by Marion Ames Taggart

A boy? Mercy, no! Whoever heard of a pure Maltese boy? A cat, of course, but such a beauty! He was as quick as he could be, and ran very fast, and jumped like a flash—flashes do jump, so that’s all right. Did you never see a flash of lightning jump from one cloud to another? Well, this Maltese kitten was so quick that his little master called him Bandersnatch—out of “Through the Looking-Glass”, you know, where the White King says: “You might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch,” or, in another place: “You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch.” So that is where quick little Ban-Ban got his first name. And the second Ban was short for Bandarlog, the name of the monkey people in the Jungle Book, because he was so much more like a monkey than a quiet, purry, furry, mild-mannered kitten.

Ban-Ban had the very best home a cat could have; indeed, he was a good deal spoiled. In this home he grew up to be three years old, but it was only his body that grew bigger. Inside that Maltese body he wore a kitten’s heart, getting younger every minute, loving play better, and cutting up more didoes all the time, instead of settling down into a staid cat, as any one would have expected him to do who saw the purple shades in his dark gray suit!

Now Ban-Ban loved his little master very much—not that he ever thought of him as his “master;” no cat ever would admit having a master. Ban-Ban considered the little boy as a friend whom he, a prince of the Maltese Royal Family, allowed to play with him. He was more useful than kitten friends because he could open doors, drag strings around, hide sticks under the edges of rugs, get milk from the refrigerator, cut up meat, play hide-and-go-seek better than cats, and shake up soft knitted things into fine beds on cold days, besides scratching a person under the chin and on the side of the cheek in a way that made a person stick out his little red tongue and purr, no matter how much he felt like playing. But that is not having a master; that is really keeping a very useful and devoted servant. Ban-Ban hated of all things to show that he loved little Rob; he liked to pretend that he was only polite to him, and often, when he meant to get up in Rob’s lap for a little talk, if Rob saw him coming, Ban-Ban would sit down and wash his face, trying to look as if he had never once thought of being loving. You see he was independent.

Because he was independent, and so very impatient, it all came about.

One day Ban-Ban had an idea dart into his brain. Ban-Ban’s ideas always darted, they never came slowly; they were just like everything else about him, “as fast as a Bandersnatch.” “If two-legged people can build towns and live in them without asking the help of us cats, why can’t we cats have a town of our own, and not ask the help of the two-legged people? They are more clumsy and stupid than we are—except Rob; he isn’t clumsy or stupid.”

It was such a wonderful thought that it half-stunned even Ban-Ban. For as much as five minutes he sat perfectly still, with only the tippest tip of his tail moving. Then he started up with a leap, as if he were jumping after those lost five minutes just as he jumped for butterflies, and away he ran down the garden to find some of his friends.

Bidelia was one of these friends. She was a little creature, very young, a tortoise-shell cat, not pretty, but so clever that no one who didn’t know her could believe how clever she was. Her cat acquaintances suspected that she wrote stories on the sly, for her sides were always spattered with big black spots on a yellow ground, and her friends believed she got ink on her yellow clothes writing stories for the magazines, because she was so very clever, and people who are very clever and write books are apt to be untidy with their ink.

Though she was younger than Ban-Ban by nearly two years she had three children, and they were already two months old: Nugget, all yellow, Puttel, black with a white thumb-mark under her chin, and Dolly Varden, with a tortoise-shell dress like her mother’s. Bidelia had good reason to be as proud of her children as she was!

Nugget.