Free The Boys Return by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

said Josh. “You're going to keep a live chicken waiting around in an open garage for—”
    “A chicken from the store would probably do,” said Steve.
    “Even if it worked, that cougar would bound intothe garage, snatch up that chicken, and be gone before you could blink,” said Beth.
    “Yeah, Steve,” said Jake.
    “No, I've got it!” Steve said. “We buy this roasting hen, see. And then we get this really strong wire, and we fasten it tight to the chicken, so when the cougar tries to run off with it, he really has to work to get it free, and meanwhile…”
    “Meanwhile the guy in the loft will probably have a heart attack,” said Josh, and the boys laughed. All but Wally.
    He could see it coming. Everyone else would set up the trap and get stuff ready, but he'd get stuck being the guy in the loft. It always happened that way. His brothers seemed to be able to talk him into anything, and with the Bensons on his case too, he wouldn't have a chance.
    “Even if that worked, Steve, how would the guy in the loft get the door closed in time?” asked Josh.
    “He'd have to do it from the window in the loft,” Steve said. “I mean, the minute the cougar got inside, he'd have to be able to lean out the window and turn the latch.”
    “Are you nuts? That's a fifteen-foot drop,” said Wally.
    Tony looked over at the girls. “You haven't changed the latch on the garage door, have you?”
    “No,” said Beth.
    The doors of the Bensons' garage were more like the doors of a barn. Above the large door was a window, inthe loft. The door itself had two sections, each covering half the opening, and when they came together in the middle, a metal piece on one section fit over a latch on the other. When someone turned the latch sideways, the doors were fastened and couldn't rattle and bang in the wind.
    “What a guy would need to do, see,” Steve continued, “is leave just half the garage door open, and the minute the cougar got inside, he could reach down with a fishing pole, push the other half of the door shut, flip the metal piece over the latch, then knock the latch sideways using the pole.”
    “Yeah? Then what?” asked Wally.
    “Then we call the sheriff and tell him you're trapped in the garage,” said Tony, grinning a little.
    “Dad said if any of us sneaked out again at night, he'd ground us for a week,” said Wally. “Who's the lucky guy who gets to wait up in the loft for the cougar?”
    “Who says it has to be a guy?” Eddie challenged him.
    “Okay. It could be any one of us, except Peter or Dougie,” said Tony, and he immediately turned to the two young boys. “You guys aren't to say one word to anyone about this, understand? Not a word !”
    “We won't!” said Peter. “What do you think we are? Babies?”
    There was silence for a moment. In one way, each of them wanted the job, and in another way, no one wanted it.
    “I've got it!” said Jake at last. “Let's put our names in a hat, mix them up, and have somebody draw. Whoever's name is drawn is the person who will spend the night in the loft and wait for the cougar.”
    Beth got a piece of tablet paper and tore it into ten pieces, and all but Peter and Doug wrote their names on a piece. They folded them once and dumped them in Eddie's baseball cap. Eddie bounced the slips of paper around a little, then held the cap above Peter's head and asked him to draw one.
    Peter reached up. His fingers closed around a slip of paper, and he handed it to Eddie. She unfolded it and read the name aloud: “Wally.”

Twelve

Getting Ready
    I t was raining again on Thursday morning. Not a shower, not a thunderstorm. Just a steady cold rain from a steady gray sky.
    “Perfect!” Eddie said to her sisters as they trooped downstairs to breakfast.
    Even more perfect was that Mrs. Malloy was looking out the kitchen window saying, “Poor Mrs. Hatford! Imagine having nine boys cooped up inside your house on a day like this!”
    Most of the houses in