"'Cause I'm going to make believe I'm a captain, and the mouse is an enemy, and I'm going to capture the enemy. Like in war."
Down to the kitchen the children hurried. They could hear their dog Carlo barking and growling, and they could hear Mary, the cook, laughing.
"She isn't very scared, I guess," said Dick.
"Well, she was, and she was up on a chair," declared Dorothy. "Come on, Dick!"
Together they hurried into the kitchen. Mary was no longer standing on a chair. Instead she was sitting down in one, laughing as hard as she could laugh.
Carlo was out in the middle of the floor, tossing up into the air something brown and fuzzy.
"Where's the mouse?" cried Dick. "I want to see if I can shoot it with my pop gun."
"Mouse? There isn't any mouse, Dick!" laughed Mary.
"Dorothy said there was," he declared.
"Yes, and I thought there was, too," went on the cook. "But it was only a piece of fur that Carlo had. It's one of the tails off Martha's fur neck-piece. She dropped it, and Carlo found it. I guess he thought it was a mouse, and I did, too, at first."