When Lieutenant Lagerlöf took over Mårbacka, on the death of his father, there were no less than seventeen cats in the barn. They were all of the tortoise-shell variety, with not a black or white or gray one among them. For Britta Lambert believed it was only the red cats that brought luck.
Now the Lieutenant was a great lover of animals, and he had no antipathy whatever to cats; but to feed and house seventeen of them in the barn—that, he thought, was a bit too much. The cats, to be sure, were vigilant hunters of rats and field-mice, but they also pursued little birds; there was hardly so much as a sparrow left at Mårbacka. Besides, the milk they consumed would have fed three calves.
Anyway, it’s a sorry business having to do away with cats. So the Lieutenant, rather than distress Britta Lambert and the other womenfolk, said nothing to them about a certain plan he had in mind. He merely gave the wink to old Bengt, the former stableman, who still pottered round the place at this and that.
Then, in some mysterious way the cats began to disappear—not all at once, but by gradual elimination. Britta Lambert thought she noticed that one and another of her precious tabbies was missing, yet she was not quite sure about it, since the cats were all so much alike in colour and markings. She attempted to count them as they came up for their milk, but that was not so easy, for they pushed and crowded each other at the milk-trough. Then, too, it was almost pitch-dark in the barn. She complained to the old housekeeper and the young mistress.
“You see,” she said, “’tis this I fear me, that if you do away with the red cats, you’ll do away with the luck in the cow-house. No good can come to folks as begins by being ungrateful to them that’s helped us all up to now.”
Fru Lagerlöf and the housekeeper both assured her they had no evil designs upon her cats. They thought she would soon have them back again—the whole seventeen.
All the same, Britta noted that the cats were becoming fewer and fewer. She suspected this one and that one, but none would confess to guilt. The only one of whom she could never have believed anything so sinful as that he would harm a cat, was the Lieutenant. She knew that his mother had taught him better.
“This’ll never do, Master,” she said to the Lieutenant every time he came into the barn. “You don’t know how worried I am! The cats are leaving me.”
“I don’t see but they’re running in front of my feet the same as usual,” the Lieutenant replied.
“If there be thirteen left, ’tis all and no more,” wailed the cow-girl. “I’d hate to be standing in the shoes of the one that’s doing this! And worst of all, the farm’ll suffer for it.”