Free The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned by Paul Gallico Page B

thing and giving her the lead which she was quick to take up.
    'It's really quite simple,' she explained. 'For instance, you can smell the tea. Well, that wasn't around last time I was outside. Means a tea boat has come in and they've opened the hatches. No cats about—I don't get any signals on my receiver, at least not hostile ones. The dog that went by, well, goodness knows, you can smell him. If he had any class or self-respect that might lead him to chase cats, he'd be clean, and a clean dog smells different. This one was filthy, and that's why I say he's nothing to worry about. He'll be slinking along down back alleys and glad to be left alone. And as for the goods train that went by, after you get to know the neighbourhood it'll be easy for you too. You see, the smoke smell comes from the left, down where the docks are, so of course it went that way. And you know it was a goods train, because you can smell everything that was in the wagons. There, you see how easy it is?'
    Peter again said the right thing, for he was learning how to please Jennie. 'I think you're enormously clever,' he told her. Her purr almost drowned out the sound of a passing horse-drawn dray. Then she cried to him gaily, `Come along, Peter! We're off!' and the two friends went out into the cobbled street.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT: Hoodwinking of an Old Gentleman
    THE pair went off down the busy commercial street towards their destination not at a walk, lope, trot, or even a run, but a series of short, swift charges, a kind of point-to-point dash, and again Peter learned something about the life and ways of a homeless city cat that has no friends and must fend for itself.
    For, as Jennie explained and he could very well see, in a city that was stony, hostile and full of all kinds of moving vehicles rushing people, bicycles, delivery hand-trucks, carts, lorries, wagons, hardly heeding one another, much less anything that might be so close to the ground as a cat, it would never do to be caught simply carelessly walking along or even running.
    `You never leave one place of shelter,' was the way Jennie had explained it to him, `until you have the next one ahead of you picked out where you are going to go in case of trouble of any sort. And then the best thing to do is to make a dash for it and not linger between them. Of course, when you're in your own neighbourhood you know all sorts of spots to get to in a hurry, and you can afford to be more relaxed. But when going through strange territory, always play for safety.'
    And so they made. their way from point to point and cover to cover in little short rushes that Peter found most exciting and exhilarating until they reached the gateway to the dockyard where everything was exactly as Jennie had said it would be. The great iron gates to the yards stood wide open, a goods train had been through, indeed the last of the trucks and the brake van actually were not yet inside the gate, though the train had stopped, so long was it. And here too they no longer needed to indulge in the short rushes, for the goods wagons, vans, tankers, box and refrigerator wagons gave them excellent cover and they were able to trot along beneath them in perfect safety and at a rapid pace.
    The shack was far down at the very end of the docks, but on the land side of the sheds, and consisted of a little wooden house of but one room with a door leading into it, two windows, one on either side, of which several panes were broken and stuffed with rags, and a crooked stove-pipe that emerged from the tin roof instead of a chimney.
    In spite of its drab surroundings amidst coils of rope and cable, rusting steel rails and oddments of wood, weather-beaten and sagging as it was, the shack looked cheerful and even homelike, because on either side of the door, on the ground, were two long green boxes with earth in them, and in the boxes bright red geraniums were growing. From the open doorway as Peter and Jennie approached came the appetising smell