His mother was doubtful as to the wisdom of adopting a third member into a family which could barely feed two without one going half hungry.  Also, she disliked cats intensely.  She was most horribly afraid of cats.  She was just about to say that he’d have to give the kitten to somebody better able to care for it, but seeing the resigned and hopeless expression that crept into Peter’s face, she said, instead, that she reckoned they could manage to feed the little wretch, provided he kept it out of her room.  Peter joyfully agreed, washed the cat in his own basin, fed it with a part of his own supper, and took it to bed with him, where it purred itself to sleep.  Thus came Martin Luther to the house of Champneys.

When Peter had chores to do the cat scampered about him with, sidewise leapings and gambolings, and made his labor easier by seasoning it with harmless amusement.  When he wrestled with his lessons Martin Luther sat sedately on the table and watched him, every now and then rubbing a sympathetic head against him.  When he woke up at night in the shed room, he liked to put out his hand and touch the warm, soft, silky body near him.  Peter adored his cat, which was to him a friend.

And then Martin Luther took to disappearing, mysteriously, for longer and longer intervals.  Peter was filled with apprehensions, for Martin Luther wasn’t a democratic soul; aside from his affection for Peter, the cat was as wild as a panther.  The child was almost sick with anxiety.  He wandered around Riverton hunting for the beast and calling it by name, a proceeding which further convinced Riverton folk that poor Maria Champneys’s boy was not what one might call bright.  Fancy carrying on like that about nothing but a cat!  But Peter used to lie awake at night, lonesomely, and cry because he was afraid some evil had befallen the perverse creature of his affections.  Then he prayed that God would look out for Martin Luther, if He hadn’t already remembered to do so.  The world of a sudden seemed a very big, sad, unfriendly place for a little boy to live in, when he couldn’t even have a cat in it!

The disappearance of Martin Luther was Peter’s first sorrow that his mother couldn’t fully share, as he knew she didn’t like cats.  Martin Luther had known that, too, and had kept his distance.  He hadn’t even made friends with Emma Campbell, who loved cats to the extent of picking up other people’s when their owners weren’t looking.  This cat had loved nobody but Peter, a fact that endeared it to him a thousandfold, and made its probable fate a darker grief.

One afternoon, when Martin Luther had been gone so long that Peter had about given up hopes of ever seeing him again, Emma Campbell, who had been washing in the yard, dashed into the house screeching that the woodshed was full of snakes.

Peter joyfully threw aside his grammar—­snakes hadn’t half the terror for him that substantives had—­and rushed out to investigate, while his mother frantically besought him not to go near the woodshed, to get an ax, to run for the town marshal, to run and ring the fire-bell, to burn down that woodshed before they were all stung to death in their beds!