baby teeth. Spitting and snarling, he was pulled out of the tile and dropped into the gunny sack, along with his brothers. He made another mad lunge at Luke Trull but succeeded only in entangling his claws in the sacking. Furious, but unable to do anything about it at once, Frosty subsided.

The man held up his scratched hand. "The leetle—!"

The woman said, "I'm sorry!"

"Makes no mind," Luke Trull said. "I'll stop down to the drugstore an' git aught to put on it."

"I'll pay for it. Will two dollars extra be all right?"

"If ye've a mind, Miz Harris."

"You—you won't hurt the kittens?"

"Oh no, Miz Harris! 'Course not! Why would I hurt 'em when I told the Mister I'd take 'em?"

"Here's your money."

"Thankee."

Luke Trull tied the mouth of the gunny sack, slung it over the saddle horn, and swung expertly into the saddle. The horse broke into a fast walk and the gunny sack bobbed back and forth in cadence with the horse's movements. Paws spread, claws extended, Frosty steadied himself by holding onto the sacking. One of the gray kittens whimpered plaintively. Rigid with uncertainty, the second merely stared. Frosty paid his brothers not the slightest attention.

He could smell nothing, see nothing except dim light that filtered through the gunny sack's coarse weave, and he heard little but the measured clomp-clomp of the horse's hooves. Since he could know nothing whatever of what lay about him, or what might happen next, he couldn't possibly plan any intelligent course of action or know how to cope with the next problem that arose. He must be ready for anything and he was.

Though he knew no fear, his nerves were taut as a blown-up balloon. From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, no tiny part of him was even slightly relaxed. Just so, provision is made for all cats that find themselves in serious and uncertain situations. Frosty, and to a lesser extent the gray kittens, were ready to fly in any direction or to do instantly whatever the next second, the next minute, the next hour, or any elapsed time, might have them do.

They did not bob around as puppies would have because each had all four claws firmly fixed in the sacking and, in a very real way, even while they were together, they remained apart. Though on occasion several cats will cooperate to do what one alone cannot do, theirs is not the pack instinct of dogs and wolves. Intelligent enough to work with others when the situation demands it, they are too highly individualized to look to any one leader and too smart ever completely to trust their own fate to anything except themselves.

The gray kitten that had mewed before, called a second time. It was not a cry of fear, but one of appeal. Until now, the kitten's world had consisted of the shed, of daytime forays into the yard, of all the food it could eat and of unfailingly gentle treatment at the hands of human beings. The desperate kitten wanted only to be back in the familiar world from which it had been so rudely torn.

Far more intelligent and advanced than either of the gray kittens, Frosty gave himself wholly to facing things as they were, with no vain lamentations for what had been. Still able to smell only the dusty sack, to see little and to hear only the horse's hoofbeats, he kept every sense alert. Thus he knew when they left the road and started climbing a mountain path. The little dust bombs that had been exploding under the horse's feet no longer floated upwards. Metal-shod hooves rang on rocks and boulders and the air was cleaner.

Frosty sensed only the physical change, welcome because the dust was less oppressive. Being a cat, he knew nothing of the town's social life, as it was conducted by humans, and if he had known, he wouldn't have cared. But town life had a definite bearing on why he and his brothers were here.

The town owed its existence to the fact that it was the logical place to establish a railroad yard. Its inhabitants consisted of those who worked for the railroad and various business and professional people who had gathered to serve them. The first scheduled train had run over the new-laid rails just twenty-eight years ago, and, with few exceptions, everybody in the town who was past thirty had come from somewhere else. Those who'd stayed had established the town's oldest and most-respected families, and such traditions as there were centered about them and the history they'd seen in the making.

It was a colorful story, for though there hadn't been any town, there had been people here long before the steel rails crept this way. They were the Trulls, the Casmans, the Haroldsons, the Gates, and others. According to popular report, in which there was probably more than a little truth, these natives of the region lived back in the hills because no place that smacked even faintly of civilization would have them and, before the coming of the railroad and the building of the town, they did just about as they pleased. A choice story, one the town's newspaper reprinted at least once a year, concerned the twenty-five-year-long feud that the Trulls and Casmans had carried on with the Gates.

Occasionally, some of the hill people had come into town, worked on the railroad long enough to get money for some purpose or other and gone again. They hadn't wanted steady jobs and they still didn't.

Now the town's relations with the hill dwellers were somewhat curious. The railroad had brought law with it and the hill people had had to conform, but they had never conformed completely. Periodically, the game warden found a Trull, Casman, or some other hillman, with game or fish taken out of season. Two years ago, federal officers, searching for illicit stills, had combed the whole area thoroughly. They had uncovered no bootlegging operations but that, as every townsman knew, was only because the hill dwellers had been too clever for them.

Legend and fact mingled indiscriminately to influence the town's view of the hill people. It was commonly believed that, once a hill man promised to do something, the deed was as good as done. It was also believed that, back in their own wild country, the hill dwellers were still a law unto themselves. Many were the darkly whispered tales of violence, even murder, and pagan rites. But most of these stories were born in some town-dweller's imagination.

However, there was fact, and Andy Gates furnished the outstanding example. Andy was the last resident survivor of the Gates clan. Three years ago, looking fourteen but claiming he was sixteen, Andy had come into town and obtained a job on the night shift in the roundhouse. Days he had enrolled in the town's high school, where he not only completed a four-year course in three but graduated as salutatorian. Then, though he might have continued to work for the railroad, with every prospect of some day having a very good job, Andy had gone back to the hills.

So fact and romance tinted each other, and when Mrs. Harris handed the three kittens over to Luke Trull, she hadn't the least idea that he would do anything but exactly as he had promised and give them a fine home. She didn't know anything about his home and had only a vague idea of where he lived. However, who could doubt that surplus kittens, for which there was no room in town, would be very well off in the hills? It never occurred to her, it never occurred to anyone outside the hills, that Luke was a man of the meanest order. With an inborn aversion to work, he liked money and he constantly schemed and planned to get some. His scratched hand, an injury not even worth noticing, he had quickly recognized as an opportunity to extort two dollars more from Mrs. Harris. He had never had the slightest intention of buying any antiseptic from the drugstore and now, as his horse climbed the mountain path, he looked for a good place to rid himself