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“To do my chores, Mom,” Jubal said with wide-eyed earnestness. “I want to get them all done before I start my homework.”

“Right, and I’m Maid bloody Marian. You doing your chores before you even check to see if there’s dessert, that doesn’t fly, my lad. What’s the use of having the biggest liar on Sherwood for a daddy if you can’t fib any better than that?”

Pop looked up from a forkful of his second helping of the pie. “Leave him be, Dorice. He’s just going to check on the livestock.”

They hadn’t told mom about the cats yet. They’d have to sooner or later but hoped to stall as long as possible. She probably wouldn’t raise too much fuss over the barn cat because even a cat-disliker had to admit that barn cats served a good and useful purpose. But Pop had said he didn’t want her to know about the fancy new cat yet.

Jubal was pretty sure it was because there was something fishy about the way Pop had come by Chessie.

If Mom knew what they were up to, she wasn’t saying anything. Jubal thought she might have a good idea about at least some of what was going on. He’d caught her staring at some cat hairs on his overalls, wrinkling her nose when he hadn’t washed off the smell of cat pee good enough. Dad’s industriousness, if nothing else, was enough to rouse her suspicions. Suddenly he was doing all the men’s jobs in the barn, the ones Jubal couldn’t do that she usually had to do since the old man, for a retired guy, spent a lot of time in space.

She rolled her eyes and pointed to the door as she bit down on a biscuit. Even if she had guessed the whole thing, Jubal wasn’t too worried.

Mom had stayed married to Pop in spite of everything he did that made her mad. She usually managed to be looking the other way when Pop pulled a lot of his shenanigans. If she didn’t see it, she wasn’t responsible for it. She was a very practical lady. She had scruples but they were flexible.

Pop said they just needed to keep her in the dark until the kittens were born and he could sell a couple, because she was apt to be more reasonable once she saw they were the start of a lucrative enterprise.

Jubal kept himself to a walk until he reached the kitchen door, then lit out for the barn as fast as he dared.

The cats were settled down snug and cozy in the little rag beds he had made for them in the hay. They seemed to be getting along fine. The momcat had moved right in with Chessie to the stall room Pop and he had built to protect her—and to protect Pop, Jubal was pretty sure.

The momcat meowed and yowled about the closed door, though, so Pop took the truck to town and brought home one of those cat doors that could be keyed to open only for a cat wearing a special collar. It took both Jubal and Pop to put the collar on the barn cat, which she obviously considered was taking undue liberties. She had not liked that collar even a little, but being a sensible cat, when her gyrations and scratchings didn’t get it off, she seemed to forget about it and went about her business.

Chessie didn’t get a collar but didn’t seem to mind the door. Pop said she was used to being indoors and in confined places a lot so he figured she probably liked it that way.

Jubal opened the door a crack. If he’d been a little taller, he could have looked through the crescent moon carved through the front of it. The door had been on the privy that used to stand in back of the house, before they got hooked up to the Locksley sewer system. They’d had to saw off the top and add a board to the bottom to make it fit, but it worked okay. It still stank a little, but cats didn’t seem to mind that kind of thing.

He meant to just peek at them before bringing the cows in for the night, feeding the chickens, and milking, but when he saw both cats licking a sticky-looking kitten while part of another kitten was coming out of its mom’s back end, he couldn’t leave. Even though he’d seen that other newborn animals were a sticky mess just out of the mama, he somehow thought the kittens would be all fluffy and cute and bright-eyed.

But the first kitten out of the chute had