What did it mean? No cat had ever treated me with such discourtesy before. Then it was that I bethought me of how few of the feline brotherhood or sisterhood I had seen abroad of late.
Have they been carried off by an epidemic? Do cats catch influenza? or catalepsy? Has the scrap-market been affected by the high cost of living? Has the percentage of nutriment in the garbage can diminished to the vanishing point? Have the mice struck for shorter hours?
As I pondered thus at the corner of a lowly street, there tripped past my line of vision a fur coat whose opulence and sheen made its background of untidy brick and stone seem doubly dull and dingy. The motive power of this unlikely pelt was (as far as could be seen) lisle thread and oxford ties but I made no further note of the girl; my mind was fixed on the coat—it was the third of its kind I had observed in as many minutes in that mean street.
A shiver ran through me; I had seen a ghost, a procession of ghosts. It was as if a ouija board had suddenly screamed miaou!
And they say cats come back.
THE RUTHLESSNESS OF MR. COBB
One by one the idols of tradition go by the board. William Tell’s Apple and Paul Revere’s Ride were long ago cast into the trash-basket of Fiction; even Joan of Arc has been received into the mythology of Sainthood, and now that hero of our happy childhood, Casablanca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, is about to be snatched from us by that reckless iconoclast, Mr. Irvin Cobb.