The Pet-Sitting Peril by Willo Davis Roberts

Author:Willo Davis Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

Chapter Seven

It was a good thing Sam was with him that evening, or Nick would never have gotten Eloise’s medicine into her. He had waited until after Maynard’s walk, putting it off as long as possible. Even with both of them chasing her into a corner, and Sam throwing the towel this time to immobilize her, the cat managed not to swallow about half of what they tried to put into her.

“What’s wrong with her?” Sam asked. “She’s too strong to be very sick, seems to me.” He sucked at a scratch on his thumb.

“We better clean off your hand and put antiseptic on it. I don’t know what her problem is, and right now I don’t care. I wish I hadn’t told Mrs. Sylvan that I’d take care of her.”

Eloise had retreated to the top of a china cabinet and surveyed them with big, malevolent eyes, cleaning off her white fur where the medicine had spilled.

“Why don’t you tell Mrs. Sylvan you don’t want to give Eloise her medicine any more?” Sam asked. “She probably wouldn’t even want you to do it if she knew how we had to wrestle her around.”

Nick shifted his weight from one foot to the other, staring at the cat. “I don’t know. For one thing, I don’t know who else she’d get to do it. I mean, can you imagine Mr. Griesner or Clyde and Roy coming in to give medicine to a stuck-up cat? And I agreed to do it, so I’m sort of obligated. Dad says if you agree to do something, you should follow through even if it turns out it’s not as good a deal as you expected it to be. It’s kind of a challenge, I guess.”

Sam pushed back the lock of red hair that had fallen forward. “I suppose I wouldn’t like it, either, if somebody held me down and put nasty-tasting stuff into me. Oh, well, come on. Let’s get out of here and feed Maynard and Fred. I like them a lot better.”

It was easy to like Maynard and Fred. They were both friendly, and Maynard, especially, was cute. He knew how to lie down on command, to sit, to beg, to shake hands, and to fetch things. Fred didn’t do any tricks, but the big gray striped cat would rub against them and his rumbling purr was clear evidence that he liked them, too.

When all their chores were over, they had to decide where to spend the night. “Maybe you should stay one night with Rudy, and the next one with Maynard and Fred,” Sam suggested. “That would be fair to everybody.”

“I’m getting the extra pay to stay with Maynard and Fred,” Nick pointed out. “Only of course before Rudy wasn’t alone, and in some ways he’s a bigger baby than Maynard. At least Maynard has Fred to keep him company. And the two of them don’t really seem to mind being alone the way Rudy does.”

“I wonder if we could take them all into the same apartment? Would that work? Then everybody would keep everybody else company.

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