One day, Mister Biggle got an angry phone call from a customer. "Your puppy pastries taste awful today! I don't know what it is -- I can't put my paw on it, but... but it's just wrong!"
Mister Biggle was very concerned! He went down to the factory floor and inspected all the equipment and all the machinery, sniffing here and snuffling there with his great big hound nose, but he couldn't find anything amiss! Mister Biggle was stumped. He decided to hire a great detective to help him solve this mystery, and who better than Little Miggle?
The very next day, Little Miggle arrived bright and early, before all the morning shift cats, to meet with Mister Biggle on the factory floor. "So your pastries are coming out funny, eh?" she asked him. "Let's have a look-see. Where do you get your ingredients from?"
Mister Biggle nodded and led Little Miggle out to the loading zone. "See here!" He waved his arms exuberantly, his big ol' hound ears flopping about. "Only the finest rotted fish heads and chicken carcasses for my pastries! We get the straight from the docks, and the hen houses too!"
Little Miggle ventured forward to peek at the trucks, her delicate kitten nose wrinkling as the stench washed over her. She turned away in horror at the smell of rot, and the sight of thousands of flies buzzing over the shipment. "I... uh... I see! Well!" She scuttled back inside. "And you haven't changed who you buy from? Same truck drivers as usual?"
Mister Biggle looked confused as Little Miggle fled the sweet smell of fish and chicken. "No, no, nothing's changed. Everything's been just the same as it's always been!" Taking one last whiff of the delightful aroma, Mister Biggle followed the detective kitten back inside.
"After it's delivered, where does it go?" Little Miggle asked.
"Right this way," said Mister Biggle, leading onward to a large, echoing storage room. Huge vats of fish heads and chicken carcasses lined the walls, spewing their scent into the air. "They come in here, and are aged another 2 weeks to get the flavors juuuuuuust right!" Mister Biggle looked very proud of his operations.
Little Miggle cringed as she stepped inside. "Ah, so, who has access to this room?"
"The shift foremen, and me of course."
"They haven't been acting strange, have they?" Little Miggle eyed the tubs with deep suspicion, secretly wondering how it is that dogs could stand to eat the stuff.
"Well, I don't think so." Mister Biggle shook his head, making his ears flop all about.
They left the storage room and went on to the factory floor. "Where does the, er, fine ingredients go after the store room?" Mister Biggle pointed to a round machine sporting a large cone, with a mess of tubes coming out its belly, and covered with valves and levers and blinking lights.
Behind the machine was a ladder leading to a narrow catwalk. Little Miggle scampered up it, trotted to the machine, and peered into the cone. It was a smooth metal slide that culminated in a fearsome rotating blade. A tantalizingly familiar scent of catnip tickled Little Miggle's nose. She craned her neck and leaned out farther and farther.
"Whoa there, Little Miggle!" cried Mister Biggle as he hauled her back from the edge. "Careful! You don't want to fall in and get chopped up into puppy pastries."
Little Miggle squirmed a bit, looking abashed. "You're sure nothing has changed? The machine's not broken? The fish aren't rotten? Er, more than they're supposed to be?"
Mister Biggle shook his head. "Everything looks fine to me."
"Well, the only thing that's left are the workers then."
Mister Biggle nodded, leading the way back down the ladder to the employee lounge. Here, rows of lockers lined the walls, one for each factory cat. Mister Biggle took out a big ring of keys and opened a locker, and Little Miggle poked through it looking for suspicious things.
"AHA!" she cried triumphantly. "Just as I thought! Catnip!"
"What? That's not allowed! I'll not have any drugged out cats on my factory floor!" Mister Biggle stamped his foot, indignant. "Why, I'll fire that cat right now!"
"No, wait!" Little Miggle pleaded. "We haven't looked through them all yet!"
So Mister Biggle confiscated the catnip, and opened all the lockers. And in each locker, they found a little bag of catnip, cleverly hidden here or there or in a boot. "Well I never! They're all drugged out kitties!" Mister Biggle waggled his ears in despair.
Little Miggle did not answer. She was too busy nibbling on an errant bag of catnip.
"Little Miggle! Give that here!" Mister Biggle snatched the bag of catnip from the kitten and bopped her lightly on the nose. Little Miggle pouted. "You can have some after you solve my mystery," said Mister Biggle.
"Okay," said Little Miggle, a little sullenly.
"It looks like the early shift cats are here, let's go talk to them! I need to yell at them about their catnip habit anyway." Mister Biggle thrust the catnip into his coat pockets and called all the cats over. They stood around the beagle in a loose semi-circle curiously. "We found catnip in all your lockers! See here!" The beagle waved a pawful of catnip bags in the air. "What have you got to say for yourselves?"
The cats of the early shift looked at each other and, as one, they shrugged nonchalantly. One of them yawned and said, "You already pulled out the catnip, so how can you prove that you didn't plant them in our lockers to begin with?" The other cats sniggered as Mister Biggle turned red and sputtered in indignation.
Little Miggle was getting bored with this. She looked all about the factory idly, when suddenly she noticed a little shadow creeping along the catwalk overhead. Little Miggle's tail puffed out with excitement as she silently stalked up the ladder after the figure. She inched closer... closer... and pounced!
"Wah!" The figure crumpled to the ground in an ungainly heap of kicking feet and lashing tail. "Little Miggle, why are you jumping on me so early in the morning!"
"Little Tiggle? What are you doing here?" Little Miggle peered over her paws at her little brother.
"Don't you know? I work here!" Little Tiggle huffed indignantly, heaving Little Miggle off of him.
"Hey, aren't you on the afternoon shift?" Mister Biggle panted from the top of the ladder. "What are you doing here so early?"
Little Tiggle clambered to his feet. "Well sir, you told me to experiment with making kitty treats, so I was staying late working on a recipe. But all this rotten fish and chicken tastes pretty bad! So I got some nice fresh fish and newly slaughtered chickens, mixed with my special catnip, and I've been experimenting with different test batches!" Little Tiggle shook out a packet of extremely aromatic catnip, looking very proud of himself.
"But where did you make the test batches? There's only one production line!" Mister Biggle looked confused.
"Oh, I had to use this one." Little Tiggle pointed to the enormous cone beside him.
A slow, broad grin split Mister Biggle's muzzle as he realized that the bad flavors were not the result of corporate espionage, but cross contamination between doggy and kitty treats. "Mystery solved! Little Miggle, you're a genius!"
Little Miggle did not respond.
"Little Miggle?" Mister Biggle looked around. There on the catwalk, rolling about and purring contentedly, was Little Miggle, who had gotten her little teeth into Little Tiggle's special catnip. She looked so cute, purring and rolling about, that Mister Biggle pulled out a camera and took many photos of her. "Fantastic! Little Tiggle, I hereby appoint you Chief Scientist in charge of making a delicious kitty treat! And Little Miggle, you can be the cute kitten mascot!"
