Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

"Is it my fault you stayed out all night?" I ask him.

He sticks his tail straight up and marches down the hall to the kitchen, where he waits for me to open the milk and dish out the cat food.

Then he goes to bed.

One morning he's not there when I open the door, and he still hasn't showed up when I get back from school.

I get worried and go down to talk to Butch.

"Wa-a-l," says Butch, "sometimes that cat sit and talk to me a little, but most times he go on over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk to his lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of buildings put on heat and closed up their basements. Maybe

"Which building's his friend live in?" I ask.

"Forty-six, the big one. His friend's a little black-and-white cat, sort of belongs to the night man over there. He feeds her."

I go around to Twenty-first Street and case Forty-six, which is a pretty fair-looking building with a striped awning and a doorman who saunters out front and looks around every few minutes.

While I'm watching, a grocery boy comes along pushing his cart and goes down some stairs into the basement with his carton of groceries.

This gives me an idea.

I'll give the boy time to get started up in the elevator, and then I'll go down in the basement and hunt for Cat.

If someone comes along and gets sore, I can always play dumb.

I go down, and the coast is clear.

The elevator's gone up, and I walk softly past and through a big room where the tenants leave their baby carriages and bicycles.

After this the cellar stretches off into several corridors, lit by twenty-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling.

You can hardly see anything.

The corridors go between wire storage cages, where the tenants keep stuff like trunks and old cribs and parakeet cages.

They're all locked.

"Me-ow, meow, me-ow!" Unmistakably Cat, and angry.

The sound comes from the end of one corridor, and I fumble along, peering into each cage to try to see a tiger cat in a shadowy hole.

Fortunately his eyes glow and he opens his mouth for another meow, and I see him locked inside one of the cages before I come to the end of the corridor.

I don't know how he got in or how I'm going to get him out.

While I'm thinking, Cat's eyes flick away from me to the right, then back to me.

Cat's not making any noise, and neither am I, but something is.

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