George hated them. They stuck their dirty pig noses into his bin. They sprayed stinky juice over his drying socks. They screeched big time. Hair fell off them. They were local cats - stringy, drawling, gum-chewing felines who poured through Dixie's cat flap all day and all night without end.
     Local. George pronounced the word like he was holding it in tweezers. Local meant something different to George. Local didn't mean you lived round here, oh no. After all, George lived round here, and he couldn't be called local. For local, read mentally-subnormal-uneducated-morons who wear clothes with writing on them and enjoy the later works of Stevie Wonder. There had to be a king and queen, of course. The king was a terrible old man who wore six-shooters and spurs, and shouted in such a tremendous voice that the rattlers on the prairie would run into their holes under the prickly pear. Before there was a royal family they called the man "Whispering Ben." When he came to own 50,000 acres of land and more cattle than he could count, they called him O'Donnell "the Cattle King."
     The queen had been a Mexican girl from Laredo. She made a good, mild, Coloradoclaro wife, and even succeeded in teaching Ben to modify his voice sufficiently while in the house to keep the dishes from being broken. When Ben got to be king she would sit on the gallery of Espinosa Ranch and weave rush mats. When wealth became so irresistible and oppressive that upholstered chairs and a centre table were brought down from San Antone in the wagons, she bowed her smooth, dark head, and shared the fate of the Danaë.
     To avoid lèse-majesté you have been presented first to the king and queen. They do not enter the story, which might be called "The Chronicle of the Princess, the Happy Thought, and the Lion that Bungled his Job."
     Local people. George didn't care for them. He could understand why they existed, and how they had come to be as they were. He even believed they had certain rights. But George occupied a comfy parallel universe and when they or their cats invaded it he wasn't happy.