Rama the Gypsy Cat Read Online Free

gently. With a quickening of spirits, he felt a faint warmth in the body.
    “He ain’t dead, Pa. He’s alive.” He wiped his hands against his britches. “I’ll take him on up to the house where its warm.”
    “You got work here,” his father reminded him.
    “I’ll be back, Pa, I’ll be right back. It won’t take me more than a minute to take him up to the house.”
    Making a cradle of his hands, he lifted Rama’s limp body and carried it up the path to the cabin. He dared not linger and risk his father’s displeasure but he did pause long enough to put an old shirt by the fireplace and set Rama gently on it.
    “There,” he said. “You’re going to be all right, Cat. I know it.”
    With a backward glance at Rama, he went out the door and joined his parents at the raft.
    “I think he’s going to be all right, Ma,” he said as he picked up the sack of grain.
    In the thin light of the lantern, his mother’s eyes were wide and shiny. “We’ll do what we can for him, Son, only don’t be too disappointed, hear, if the cat don’t. ...”
    “He’ll be all right,” the boy said as he moved shakily toward the house under his heavy load.
    His mother shook her head slowly. There had been many disappointments for the boy since they had come here and built the cabin five years ago: money saved for a rifle now gone to help buy these supplies; a beloved hound dog that had been bitten by a rabid fox; crops that didn’t grow; barns that burned; a calf carried away by the flooding river.
    When the raft was unloaded, she hurried up the path to have a look at the cat herself.
    She was standing with Jimmy looking down at the cat when the man came in. He crossed to the fireplace and propped one heavy mud-caked boot on the hearth.
    “It’s his throat that’s hurt, Pa,” Jimmy said.
    His father bent down, looked into Rama’s eyes, and said, “It’s more than his throat.”
    “What is it, Pa?”
    “The cat’s hurt bad.”
    “But where?”
    His father ran his long fingers gently over Rama. “It’s his head most likely.”
    “Ain’t there nothing we can do for him?”
    “Just let him be. An animal gets hurt, you let him be as much as you can.”
    “All right, Pa, only I’ll stay with him for a bit. If he wakes up, he might be scared in a strange place.” He sat on the hearth and covered Rama’s body with part of the shirt.
    The shirt was of linsey and had once been red from the dye of sumac berries, but now it was faded and worn. Only Rama’s face, gray and small, showed between its folds. His eyes were open wide and stared straight ahead without seeing.

A BOY AND A CABIN
    F OR THE REST OF the night, Jimmy sat beside the cat. He stroked Rama softly between the ears to let him know he was not alone and talked to him in a low, encouraging voice.
    There were not many things a boy could wish for in this remote country. The stores with their silver knives and shiny harmonicas were far away, and this made Jimmy’s want doubly painful now. The cat was the first thing he had seen to want in a long time, and he wanted him to live so much that he would not leave him even for a moment.
    Although Rama lay still now, his muscles slack and powerless, the boy could imagine him springing upon a bit of yarn, chasing it across the cabin floor. He could imagine the cat rubbing against his legs, asking for attention.
    “You’re going to be all right,” he said again and again. “You’re going to be all right, Cat.”
    Just before dawn, his mother came to the fireplace. “Son, did you get any sleep at all?” she asked.
    “Ma, guess what?” Jimmy said in a soft voice. “He’s got a golden earring.”
    “What?”
    “An earring. Look.”
    She bent forward, disbelief written on her face. “Why, so he has!” She looked at her son in wonder, then turned to her husband. “Pa, the cat’s got a golden earring.”
    “Let me see.”
    Jimmy lifted Rama’s head slightly, and there it was.
    “Well, I never,” said