A small-town boy's club takes charge of a rose-coloured cat sent from a distance, and finds itself running a rest farm for other people's felines while a mystery collects around it. Leo Edwards wrote the Jerry Todd books in the 1920s for boys who liked their adventures ridiculous. The tone is deadpan and the plots are engineered to end in the maximum possible confusion. Fifty-five plates of nineteenth-century American painting by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, among others, follow the cats, boys, and small-town scenes that give the story its world.