SCAT!

From: Murder Incorporated - In a Keg

by Harold J. Treherne

hose bygone days on the farm, in retrospect, were good old days indeed. I hadn't been married very long and the sheen still gilded everything, even the cows had it and I was a bit of a dreamer anyway. Now, consider old Bossey for instance, a faithful domestic creature if ever there was one.

Picture a beautiful Summer day, quite warm, and long happy hours spent with those useful living adjuncts to successful farming. I refer to the farm horses, all eight of 'em. They had a wonderful, unobtrusive yet infallible way of reducing an early morning go-getter to a shadowy semblance of his former self by evening. In the morning the World is a lilting song but when evening comes, surfeited with dust, heat and 'ornery 'orses, life is no longer a song — but a dirge. I repeat — a dirge.

How comforting then, after supper to find oneself precariously teetering on a one-legged stool listening, entranced, to foamy white milky music drummed out on the bottom of a shiny and tinny pail. Thusly, this eve, was I, and the night air and soft splashing lulled me to daydreaming. Mechanically and all unseeing I went through the motions, my scattered thoughts meandering in far and pleasanter places.

All too soon reality replaces dreams and a cow's flank replaces a blur but no muffled splashing of milk was heard. Silence, dead silence, except for - but wait, I could hear little clicking sounds awfully close by, faint but unmistakable. Such sounds surely struck a familiar chord. Still milking and glancing down at the pail, what did I see? Two blue, now white kittens snug in the pail lapping milk to their hearts' content and froth all over 'em.

Operation Squirt - squirt squirt - suffered a temporary setback while I yanked two dripping, raggedy, thieving milk-plastered squirts out of the pail and threw the rest of the milk in their general direction for good measure.

Daydreaming and milking, idyllic! with pussy feet around? SCAT!