On the way out he was selecting a couple of apples from the communal fruit basket when a sweet voice at his elbow said, "You should take a banana." She was one of the two white-haired women who always smiled at him in unison when he crossed the porch or entered the lounge.
"An apple a day keeps the rain away," he said.
"But bananas, you know, are an excellent source of potassium."
"The banana," he declaimed facetiously, "was invented as a base for three scoops of ice cream, three sundae toppings, two dollops of whipped cream, a sprinkling of nuts, and a maraschino cherry. Other uses are marginal."
"Oh, Mr. Qwilleran," she said with a delighted smile, "you sound just like your column! We've been reading it in the local paper. You should be syndicated. It's so trenchant!"
"Thank you," he said with a gracious bow. He liked compliments on his writing.
"I'm Edna Moseley, and I'm here with my sister Edith. We're retired teachers."
"A pleasure to meet you. I hope you're enjoying your stay. Let's hope the weather clears shortly." Taking two apples and a banana, he edged away. She and her sister were domino players, as were the Hardings. He had classified most of the guests. The newlyweds had been jigsaw puzzlers. Two older men played chess; probably retired teachers. A young couple with a well-behaved child played Scrabble.
Then there was an attractive young woman who read magazines or talked to two men who were traveling together. None of them looked like a vacationer or showed any interest in dominoes, puzzles, sunsets, or the fruit basket. Qwilleran suspected they were a detective team from the state police. All three left the next day.
Back at Four Pips Qwilleran tried to write a trenchant column, but the pelting rain and fretting Siamese disturbed him. He empathized with the cats. They had no room to practice their fifty-meter dash or their hurdles or broad jumps. For a while he amused Yum Yum by flipping a belt around for her to chase and grab. Floor space was limited, however. The sport entertained her briefly; Koko, not at all. He watched the performance as if they were both numbskulls. Koko preferred pastimes that challenged his sentience. It was that understanding that gave Qwilleran his next idea—one that would prove more significant than he expected.
"Okay, old boy, how about a friendly game of dominoes?" he proposed. He remembered Koko's interest in Scrabble and his fascination with a dictionary game they had invented Down Below. "Cats," he had written in his column, "are ingenious inventors of pastimes. Even a kitten with a ball of yarn can play an exciting game of solitaire with original rules." That column had brought him a bushel basket full of fan mail.
On that rainy day in June he and Koko collaborated on a new version of dominoes, predicated ostensibly on blind chance. First, the contents of the maroon velvet box were emptied onto the small oak table in the front window, where they were spread at random, facedown. Then Qwilleran pulled up two oak chairs facing each other. Koko enjoyed moving any small object around with his paw, whether bottlecap or wristwatch, and there were twenty-eight small objects. He stood on "his hind legs on the chair, placed his forepaws on the table, and studied the black rectangles with eyes that were wide, intensely blue, and concentrated. A faltering paw reached out. touching first one domino and then another until, with a swift movement, he knocked one off the table.
"Interesting," said Qwilleran as he picked it up and found it to be 6-6. The name painted on Nick's boat was Double-Six, and it happened to be the highest scoring piece in the set. "That was only a test. Now we start tc play." He found paper and pen for scoring and shuffled the dominoes facedown. "Your draw."
Koko looked down at the jumbled mass in his studious way, then swiped one off the table. It was 6-6 again.
"Amazing!" Qwilleran said. "That's twelve points for you. You're entitled to four draws, then it's my turn. It's not necessary or desirable to knock everything on the floor. Just draw, like this."
Nevertheless, Koko enjoyed shoving a small object from a high place, peering over the edge to see it land. His second draw was also high-scoring, 5-6, but the next to land on the floor were 2-3 and 0-1, reassuring Qwilleran that it was the luck of the draw. When all the pieces had been drawn, the fourteen on the floor totaled 90 pips; Qwilleran's score was 78. The game proved only one thing: Cats like to knock things down.
