Judas Cat by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

were boarded up with inside shutters.
    “I’ll bet you can’t even see the light in here from the outside,” Joan said.
    Alex turned around and examined the door. It had been unlocked from the outside, but there was a bolt on the inside. “Seems as though he felt safe outdoors,” Alex said, “but inside he didn’t take any chances.”
    “We shouldn’t touch anything, should we, Alex?”
    Alex felt a draft of wind behind him. “No ma’m, and by rights you shouldn’t even be here.”
    It was Waterman who had come in the door soundlessly behind them. “You want to tell me when you’re coming here, Alex. I was just laying out there waiting for somebody to show up.”
    “Why?”
    “No particular reason. Take a look around here, Alex. I didn’t mean to speak sharp to you, Miss Joan.”
    “It’s our own fault,” she said. “It just gave me a start.”
    “Look at this place,” Waterman said. “You’ll get more than that.”
    Alex was getting his first feeling that Andy Mattson had ever been alive. There was a work bench the length of the building, about twenty feet. The light he had turned on hung from a cord above the bench, shaded by an old-fashioned office globe, green on the outside and white within. Directly beneath the light was a drafting board built above the bench. It had been sandpapered smooth, but a film of dust clung to it now. Beside the drafting board was a tall stool, the kind bookkeepers used many years before. Chief Waterman sat down on it and stretched his long legs.
    “Some nest, ain’t it?” he said.
    In one corner of the room was the coal bin. Beside it was a sink between the work bench and the bin. A couple of feet from the other side of the bin was a stove, the same kind that was in the house, and beyond that, against the wall, an old leather couch with an Indian blanket folded at the bottom.
    “Andy must have worked here at night,” Alex said.
    “A queer old duck,” the chief said, “sitting on the front porch dozing that way all day, and larking out here at night. Except he wasn’t larking. Beats everything what you don’t know about people.”
    Beneath the table of the bench was a row of drawers. Alex opened one after another of them. “Would you look at the tools he had?”
    Some of the finer tools were wrapped in cotton batten. “Took care of ’em too,” Waterman said. “They say you can tell a workman by the care he takes of his tools.”
    The bench was cupboards from one end to the other beneath the drawers. Alex opened the doors. “Joan, take a look at this,” he said. He threw the beam of his flashlight over a tray of miniature animals carved by hand.
    Joan picked one up and turned it around and around. “What beautiful, beautiful work.”
    “Here’s one that works on some sort of track,” Alex said. He opened one cupboard after another. “There’s everything—farm animals, wild animals, little men, trains, tractors. Would you look at this squirrel!”
    Waterman took it from him. Its legs were on wires that gave it an amazing mobility. It could be wound up by turning the tail. Waterman set it loose across the bench. It ran and bobbed and stopped. “Watch, Alex.” In a second it started up again and repeated its life-like routine. “Did you ever see a squirrel more like it?”
    “Never.”
    “Everything’s got the same naturalness,” Waterman said. “It’s like he spent a lifetime watching things move and making them over like he was God.”
    “That may be the reason he was so fond of cats,” Joan said. “They have wonderful movement, the staccato sort of thing when they’re kittens, and a gracefulness as they mature.”
    “That might be it,” Alex said. In the last cupboard he found the wired board into which some of the animals could be set and operated on a battery. “I wonder what he used for models for the inanimate things.”
    “Mail order catalogues,” Waterman said. “They’re in the desk part under the drafting board.