wish more fervently than
ever that it might be hers.

But Mr. Catt was not really heartless. A few days later on his way home
from a short trip to his claims, he found a half-starved cat tied to a
lonely yucca far up on the mountain trail, where it had been abandoned
by its inhuman owners and left to this terrible fate. Indignation burned
within the man as he realized the plight of the unhappy animal, and
remembering Tabitha's plea for a pet, he carried the scrawny feline home
to the child, feeling assured of its welcome there. But unfortunately
the cat was as black as a coal, without a white hair on its body; its
tail had a very perceptible crook in it which refused to be straightened
out; its ears had been closely cropped, and altogether it was so gaunt
and hideous that involuntarily one shuddered to look at it.

"A cat!" exclaimed disappointed Tabitha when she had been called to see
the gift. "I never asked for a cat; I don't want a cat; I hate cats!
There are enough cats in this house already without this horrible
skeleton. I suppose you will want me to call it Tabby. Oh, dear, what a
time I do have living!"

With a wail of woe Tabitha fled up the trail to her hidden chamber among
the boulders and threw herself on the ground to sob out her grief and
anger over this unexpected and wholly unwelcome pet. That she would
regard the gift as an insult when he had presented it with the best of
intentions had never occurred to the father, and not understanding her
antipathy for all of the feline tribe, he was naturally somewhat angry
at her attitude; so he insisted that the cat had come to stay. And
indeed it looked as if she had, for no one wanted the homely, starved
creature, and though three times Tabitha surreptitiously pushed her down
the shaft of an abandoned mine on the other side of the mountain, the
animal always appeared serenely at meal time with a more ravenous
appetite than ever, and Tabitha began to think that the "nine lives of
a cat" was no joke, but a dreadful reality.

"I wish the owners of that thing had kept her. It was cruel to tie her
to the yucca and leave her to starve to death, but I 'most wish she'd
been dead when Dad found her. I hate the sight of her." She was sitting
on the lower step, elbows on her knees and chin resting in her hands as
she somberly surveyed the greedy animal lapping up the milk she had just
set before it, and vainly wished she had no pet at all.

The kitchen door opened be