CHAPTER IX
WILLIAM AND THE BLACK CAT
BUNKER, the old black cat, had been an inhabitant of William’s home ever since he could remember. Bunker officially belonged to Ethel, William’s sister, but he bestowed his presence impartially on every family in the neighbourhood. He frequently haunted the next door garden, where lived another black cat, a petted darling named Luke, belonging to Miss Amelia Blake.
William treated all cats with supreme contempt. Towards his own family’s cat he unbent occasionally so far as to throw twigs at it or experiment upon it with pots of coloured paints, but he prided himself upon despising cats, and considered that their only use in the world was to give exercise and pleasure to his beloved mongrel, Jumble.
When William lay in bed and Miss Amelia Blake’s tender accents rose nightly to his ears from the next garden, “Luky, Luky, Luky, Luky, Luk-ee-ee-ee!” he would frown scornfully.
“Huh! All for an ole cat! Fancy knowin’ ’em.”
His boast was that he did not know one cat from another.
Bunker was very old and very mangy. He employed habitually an ear-splitting and horrible yell, long drawn out and increasing in volume as it neared its nightmare climax—a yell which William loved to imitate.
“Yah-ah-ah-ah-ah-Ah-AH!”
Mr. Brown remarked many times that that cat and that boy would drive him to drink between them, but at least that boy slept at nights. It was decided one morning, when Bunker had spent a whole night in the garden without once relaxing the efforts of his vocal chords, that Bunker should leave this unsympathetic world for some sphere where, one hoped, his voice could be better appreciated, or, at any rate, submitted to some tuning process.