Free Cat Running by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

heard a part of—a part that sounded like “good-bye” and then “Lillybelle.”
    “Lillybelle?” she asked. “Did you say Lillybelle?”
    He looked up guiltily out of the tops of his eyes and nodded. “I jist calls her Lillybelle. My ma had a doll named Lillybelle onced. Not a corncob one neither. A real store-made doll like this here one.”
    “Her name,” Cat said firmly, “is Marianne.”
    He nodded. “Marianne,” he said. He looked down again, said “Good-bye, Marianne,” and then added in a whisper, “Lillybelle.” Then he put the doll into the crib and carefully tucked in the pink blanket.
    It was right then, at that moment, that something—something about the look on Sammy’s small, pointy-chinned face as he tucked in the blanket—made Cat almost certain of something she had already begun to suspect. “Sammy,” she said, “you’re a girl, aren’t you?”
    Sammy looked up, startled—and worried. “I didn’t tell,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, did I?”
    Cat grinned. “Samantha, I bet. Samantha?”
    Sammy nodded guiltily. “I ain’t supposed to tell folks, though. Not till we get back to Texas. Or when I go to school. Ma says I can be a girl agin when I start goin’ to school.”
    “Why does she say that?” Cat asked. “Why doesn’t she want you to be a girl now?”
    “I don’t rightly know,” Sammy said. She looked down at herself. At the baggy, ragged shirt and overalls. “Ma says we ain’t got no money for girl things right now. So I got to wear what don’t fit Roddy no more. And Spence too. Sometimes I get to wear Spence’s growed-out-of things too.” She ran her hand down the sleeve of the blue plaid shirt she was wearing—a much-too-big blue plaid shirt with both elbows out and a frayed collar. “This here shirt was Spence’s,” she said proudly.
    Cat started to say it was a good-looking shirt but the thickness in her throat suddenly returned, making it hard to talk. She’d found herself remembering the boxes of old dresses she’d run across in the attic when she was looking for things for the grotto. Dresses that she’d outgrown long ago and that were, for the most part, pretty old and faded, but a lot better for a little girl than the ragged scraps of a boy’s shirt.
    After a moment she swallowed hard and asked, “You got two brothers? Spence, and what did you say the other one’s name was?”
    “Roddy,” Sammy said. “Roddy’s the littlest one. And the meanest.” Then she suddenly smiled. A full-out shining smile that showed white baby teeth and dented her dirty tear-streaked cheeks. “And Zane too,” she said. “I got a big one too—name of Zane.”
    Cat felt a kind of collision somewhere in the middle of her chest, as if a swallow had tangled with a breath going the other way. “Zane?” she said, and as she said the name she could feel the anger rising up, burning away the swollen softness in her throat. She stared down at the ragged little Okie for a moment before she said, “You better get out of here, right now. You get on home and don’t you ever come back.”
    The little girl edged around her and out the door. Halfway across the grotto she turned and looked back.
    “Go on. Get!” Cat yelled. “Scat! And don’t you ever come back or I’ll call the sheriff.”
    Sammy turned and ran.

FOURTEEN
    W HEN THE LITTLE OKIE reached the tunnel she galloped down it on her hands and feet like a monkey, instead of crawling the way a larger person had to do. No wonder she’d gotten away so quickly that other time when she’d seemed to disappear as if by magic. In no time at all she was out of sight. Cat turned back toward the cottage—and noticed the pail again.
    The beat-up old oilcan pail was still sitting just outside the cottage door. Inside the pail were three walnuts, a small shriveled orange, and a chunk of very stale bread. Cat poked at the stuff with the tip of one finger. The kid’s lunch, no doubt, or maybe—Cat smiled