“What on earth shall we do with her?” Mrs. Wood said in despair. “She can’t come into the house for a month,—for a year!”
“What would you do, if it was me?” asked Eunice, reproachfully.
“If it was you? I’d take you out into the grove, and undress you, and bury your clothes, and wash you in twenty waters with carbolic soap and lavender water, and tie you up in a laundry-bag for a week.”
“Well, I can do some of that to Weejums,” Eunice replied. “I’ll go bury her, right away.”
“My dear child, don’t you know that it would kill the poor cat?”
“I’m not a baby!” said Eunice, with dignity. And Mrs. Wood went out to see what she was planning to do.
First she dug a Weejums-shaped hole in a sunny spot with the coal-shovel; then pounced upon the unhappy cat, gathering her up in an old flour sack. Weejums was rather pleased than otherwise by the attention, as of late her most friendly advances had been repulsed. But when Eunice laid her in the hole, and covered her very carefully with earth,—all but the head,—her look of rage was something comical. It was not that she was uncomfortable, but seemed to feel the implied insult, and growled like a little earthquake all the time. Her only comfort was that Torn-nose was not there to witness it.
Eunice poured a little earth over her head and forehead without getting it in her eyes, and when she was finally dug out, no one would suspect that she had ever heard of a skunk. But Mustard and Elijah distrusted her for some time.
Grandmother had taken a great fancy to Mustard when she came out on a visit, because he spit at her bare feet the first time that he met them. This was in the middle of the night, when she went down to the kitchen after a drink of water, and Mustard took her feet for white, clipped poodle-dogs, and fought them until they carried Grandmother out of the room before she intended to go.
“I like that cat,” she told Eunice the next morning. “You must give him to me, without fail. Bring him up when you and Kenneth come to the farm next month.”