Incredible Journey Read Free Page B

the old dog peering wistfully back, as though he hoped to see his friend Mrs. Oakes materialize with a juicy bone; but when the Labrador started up the road he followed. The cat still paused by the gate, one paw lifted delicately in the air—undecided, questioning, hesitant; until suddenly, some inner decisionreached, he followed the dogs. Presently all three disappeared from sight down the dusty road, trotting briskly and with purpose.
    About an hour later Mrs. Oakes walked up the driveway from her cottage, carrying a string bag with her working shoes and apron, and a little parcel of tidbits for the animals. Her placid, gentle face wore a rather disappointed look, because the dogs usually spied her long before she got to the house and would rush to greet her.
    “I expect Mr. Longridge left them shut inside the house if he was leaving early,” she consoled herself. But when she pushed open the kitchen door and walked inside, everything seemed very silent and still. She stood at the foot of the stairs and called them, but there was no answering patter of running feet, only the steady tick-tock of the old clock in the hallway. She walked through the silent house and out into the front garden and stood there calling with a puzzled frown.
    “Oh, well,” she spoke her thoughts aloud to the empty, sunny garden, “perhaps they’ve gone up to the school.… It’s a funny thing, though,” she continued, sitting on a kitchen chair a few minutes later and tying her shoelaces, “that Puss isn’t here—he’s usually sitting on the window sill at this time of the day. Oh, well, he’s probably out hunting—I’ve never known a cat like that for hunting, doesn’t seem natural somehow!”
    She washed and put away the few dishes, thentook her cleaning materials into the sitting room. There her eye was caught by a sparkle on the floor by the desk, and she found the glass paperweight, and after that the remaining sheet of the note on the desk. She read it through to where it said: “I will be taking the dogs (and Tao too of course!) …”, then looked for the remainder. “That’s odd,” she thought, “now where would he take them? That cat must have knocked the paperweight off last night—the rest of the note must be somewhere in the room.”
    She searched the room but it was not until she was emptying an ash tray into the fireplace that she noticed the charred curl of paper in the hearth. She bent down and picked it up carefully, for it was obviously very brittle, but even then most of it crumbled away and she was left with a fragment which bore the initials J. R. L.
    “Now, isn’t that the queerest thing,” she said to the fireplace, rubbing vigorously at the black marks on the tile. “He must mean he’s taking them all to Heron Lake with him. But why would he suddenly do that, after all the arrangements we made? He never said a word about it on the telephone—but wait a minute, I remember now—he was just going to say something about them when the line went dead; perhaps he was just going to tell me.”
    While Mrs. Oakes was amazed that Longridge would take the animals on his vacation, it did not occur to her to be astonished that a cat should go along too, for she was aware that the cat loved the car and always went with the dogs when Longridgedrove them anywhere or took them farther afield for walks. Like many Siamese cats, he was as obedient and as trained to go on walks as most dogs, and would always return to a whistle.
    Mrs. Oakes swept and dusted and talked to the house, locked it and returned home to her cottage. She would have been horrified to the depths of her kindly, well-ordered soul if she had known the truth. Far from sitting sedately in the back of a car traveling north with John Longridge, as she so fondly visualized, the animals were by now many miles away on a deserted country road that ran westward.
    They had kept a fairly steady pace for the first hour or so, falling into an order which was