The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies / How They Met, What Happened, and How It Ended

CHAPTER V—SAMMY OCCASIONS MUCH EXCITEMENT

“But what is the use of praying if you don’t hope?” demanded Tess, the hair-splitting theologian. “They must go together, Dot. I should think you’d see that.”

Mrs. Pinkney had lost hope of finding Sammy, however, right at the start. She knew him of course of old. He had been running away ever since he could toddle out of the gate; but she and Mr. Pinkney tried to convince themselves that each time would be the last—that he was “cured.”

For almost always Sammy’s runaway escapades ended disastrously for him and covered him with ridicule. Particularly ignominious was the result of his recent attempt, which is narrated in the volume immediately preceding this, to accompany the Corner House Girls on their canal-boat cruise, when he appeared as a stowaway aboard the boat in the company of Billy Bumps, the goat.

“And he hasn’t even taken Buster with him this time,” proclaimed Mrs. Pinkney. “He chained Buster down cellar and the dog began to howl. So mournful! It got on my nerves. I went down after Mr. Pinkney went to business early this morning and let Buster out. Then, because of the dog’s actions, I began to suspect Sammy had gone. I called him. No answer. And he hadn’t had any supper last night either.”

“I am awfully sorry, Mrs. Pinkney,” Agnes said. “It was too bad about the beets. But he needn’t have run away because of that. Ruth sent him his fifty cents, you know.”

“That’s just it!” exclaimed the distracted woman. “His father did not give Sammy the half dollar. As long as the boy was so sulky last evening, and refused to come down to eat, Mr. Pinkney said let him wait for that money till he came down this morning. He thought Ruth was too good. Sammy is always doing something.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” said the comforting Agnes. “I am sure there are lots worse boys. And are you sure, Mrs. Pinkney, that he has really run away this time?”

“Buster can’t find him. The poor dog has been running around and snuffing for an hour. I’ve telephoned to his father.”

“Who—what? Buster’s father?”

“Mr. Pinkney,” explained Sammy’s mother. “I suppose he’ll tell the police. He says—Mr. Pinkney does—that the police must think it is a ‘standing order’ on their books to find Sammy.”

“Oh, my!” giggled Agnes, who was sure to appreciate the comical side of the most serious situation. “I should think the policemen would be so used to looking for Sammy that they would pick him up anywhere they chanced to see him with the idea that he was running away.”

“Well,” sighed Mrs. Pinkney, “Buster can’t find him. There he lies panting over by the currant bushes. The poor dog has run his legs off.”

“I don’t believe bulldogs are very keen on a scent. Our old Tom Jonah could do better. But of course Sammy went right out into the street and the scent would be difficult for the best dog to follow. Do you think Sammy went early this morning?”

“That dog began to howl soon after we went to bed. Mr. Pinkney sleeps so soundly that it did not annoy him. But I knew something was wrong when Buster howled so.

“Perhaps I’m superstitious. But we had an old dog that howled like that years ago when my grandmother died. She was ninety-six and had been bedridden for ten years, and the doctors said of course that she was likely to die almost any time. But that old Towser did howl the night grandma was taken.”

“So you think,” Agnes asked, without commenting upon Mrs. Pinkney’s possible trend toward superstition, “that Sammy has been gone practically all night?”

“I fear so. He must have waited for his father and me to go to bed. Then he slipped down the back stairs, tied Buster, and went out by the cellar door. All night long he’s been wandering somewhere. The poor, foolish boy!”

She took Agnes up to the boy’s room—a museum of all kinds of “useless truck,” as his mother said, but dear to the boyish heart.

“Oh, he’s gone sure enough,” she said, pointing to the bank which was supposed to be incapable of being opened until five dollars in dimes had been deposited within it. A screw-driver, however, had satisfied the burglarious intent of Sammy.

She pointed out the fact, too, that a certain extension bag that had figured before in her son’s runaway escapades was missing.

“The silly boy has taken his bathing suit and that cowboy play-suit his father bought him. I never did approve of that. Such things only give boys crazy notions about catching dogs and little girls with a rope, or shooting stray cats with a popgun.

“Of course, he has taken his gun with him and a bag of shot that he had to shoot in it. The gun shoots with a spring, you know. It doesn’t use real powder, of course. I have always believed such things are dangerous. But, you know, his father—

“Well, he wore his best shoes, and they will hurt him dreadfully, I am sure, if he walks far. And I can’t find that new cap I bought him only last week.”

All the time she was searching in Sammy’s closet and in the bureau drawers. She stood up suddenly and began to peer at the conglomeration of articles on the top of the bureau.

“Oh!” she cried. “It’s gone!”

“What is it, Mrs. Pinkney?” asked Agnes sympathetically, seeing that the woman’s eyes were overflowing again. “What is it you miss?”

“Oh! he is determined I am sure to run away for good this time,” sobbed Mrs. Pinkney. “The poor, foolish boy! I wish I had said nothing to him about the beets—I do. I wonder if both his father and I have not been too harsh with him. And I’m sure he loves us. Just think of his taking that.”

“But what is it?” cried Agnes again.

“It stood right here on his bureau propped up against the glass. Sammy must have thought a great deal of it,” flowed on the verbal torrent. “Who would have thought of that boy being so sentimental about it?”

“Mrs. Pinkney!” begged the curious Agnes, almost distracted herself now, “do tell me what it is that is missing?”

“That picture. We had it taken—his father and Sammy and me in a group together—the last time we went to Pleasure Cove. Sammy begged to keep it up here. And—now—the dear child—has—has carried—it—away with him!”

Mrs. Pinkney broke down utterly at this point. She was finally convinced that at last Sammy had fulfilled his oft-repeated threat to “run away for good and all”—whether to be a pirate or not, being a mooted question.

Agnes comforted her as well as she could. But the poor woman felt that she had not taken her son seriously enough, and that she could have averted this present disaster in some way.

“She is quite distracted,” Agnes said, on arriving home, repeating Aunt Sarah’s phrase. “Quite distracted.”

“But if she is extracted,” Dot proposed, “why doesn’t she have Dr. Forsyth come to see her?”

“Mercy, Dot!” admonished Tess. “Distracted, not extracted. You do so mispronounce the commonest words.”

“I don’t, either,” the smaller girl denied vigorously. “I don’t mispernounce any more than you do, Tess Kenway! You just make believe you know so much.”

“Dot! Mispernounce! There you go again!”

This was a sore subject, and Ruth attempted to change the trend of the little girls’ thoughts by suggesting that Mrs. McCall needed some groceries from a certain store situated away across town.

“If you can get Uncle Rufus to harness Scalawag you girls can drive over to Penny & Marchant’s for those things. And you can stop at Mr. Howbridge’s house with this note. He must be told about poor Luke’s injury.”

“Why, Ruthie?” asked little Miss Inquisitive, otherwise Dot Kenway. “Mr. Howbridge isn’t Luke Shepard’s guardian, too, is he?”

“Now, don’t be a chatterbox!” exclaimed the elder sister, who was somewhat harassed on this morning and did not care to explain to the little folk just what she had in her mind.

Ruth was not satisfied to know that Cecile had gone to attend her brother. The oldest Kenway girl longed to go herself to the resort in the mountains where Luke Shepard lay ill. But she did not wish to do this without first seeking their guardian’s permission.

Tess and Dot ran off in delight, forgetting their small bickerings, to find Uncle Rufus. The old colored man, as long as he could get about, would do anything for “his chillun,” as he called the four Kenway sisters. It needed no coaxing on the part of Tess and Dot to get their will of the old man on this occasion.

Scalawag was fat and lazy enough in any case. In the spring Neale had plowed and harrowed the garden with him and on occasion he was harnessed to a light cart for work about the place. His main duty, however, was to draw the smaller girls about the quieter streets of Milton in a basket phaeton. To this vehicle he was now harnessed by Uncle Rufus.

“You want to be mought’ car’ful ‘bout them automobiles, chillun,” the old man admonished them. “Dat Sammy Pinkney boy was suah some good once in a while. He was a purt’ car’ful driber.”

“But he’s a good driver now—wherever he is,” said Dot. “You talk as though Sammy would never get back home from being a pirate. Of course he will. He always does!”

Secretly Tess felt herself to be quite as able to drive the pony as ever Sammy Pinkney was. She was glad to show her prowess.

Scalawag shook his head, danced playfully on the old stable floor, and then proceeded to wheel the basket phaeton out of the barn and into Willow Street. By a quieter thoroughfare than Main Street, Tess Kenway headed him for the other side of town.

“Maybe we’ll run across Sammy,” suggested Dot, sitting sedately with her ever-present Alice-doll. “Then we can tell his mother where he is being a pirate. She won’t be so extracted then.”

Tess overlooked this mispronunciation, knowing it was useless to object, and turned the subject by saying:

“Or maybe we’ll see those Gypsies.”

“Oh, I hope not!” cried the smaller girl. “I hope we’ll never see those Gypsy women again.”

For just at this time the Alice-doll was wearing the fretted silver bracelet for a girdle.

CHAPTER VI—THE GYPSY’S WORDS

“Telegraph her for particulars,” suggested Agnes, quite practically. “A broken wrist can’t be such an awful thing, Ruthie.”

“But his back! Suppose he has seriously hurt his back?”

“Goodness me! That would be awful, of course. He might grow a hump like poor Fred Littleburg. But I don’t believe that anything like that has happened to Luke, Ruthie.”

Her sister was not to be easily comforted. “Think! There must be something very serious the matter or they would not keep his own sister from seeing him.” Ruth herself had had no word from Luke since the accident.

Neither of the sisters knew that Cecile Shepard had never had occasion to send a telegram before and had never received one in all her life.

But she learned that a message of ten words could be sent for thirty-two cents to Milton, so she had divided what she wished to say in two equal parts! The second half of her message, however, because of the mistake of the filing clerk at the telegraph office in Oakhurst, did not arrive at the Corner House for several hours after the first half of the message.

Ruth Kenway meanwhile grew almost frantic as she considered the possible misfortune that might have overtaken Luke Shepard. She grew quite as “extracted”—to quote Dot—as Mrs. Pinkney was about the absence of Sammy.

“Well,” Agnes finally declared, “if I felt as you do about it I would not wait to hear from Mr. Howbridge. I’d start right now. Here’s the time table. I’ve looked up the trains. There is one at ten minutes to one—twelve-fifty. I’ll call Neale and he’ll drive you down to the station. You might have gone with the children if that telegram had come earlier.”

Agnes was not only practical, she was helpful on this occasion. She packed Ruth’s bag—and managed to get into it a more sensible variety of articles than Sammy Pinkey had carried in his!

“Now, don’t be worried about us,” said Agnes, when Ruth, dressed for departure, began to speak with anxiety about domestic affairs, including the continued absence of the little girls. “Haven’t we got Mrs. McCall—and Linda? You do take your duties so seriously, Ruth Kenway.”

“Do you think so?” rejoined Ruth, smiling rather wanly at the flyaway sister. “If anything should happen while I am gone—”

“Nothing will happen that wouldn’t happen anyway, whether you are at home or not,” declared the positive Agnes.

Ruth made ready to go in such a hurry that nobody else in the Corner House save Agnes herself realized that the older sister was going until the moment that Neale O’Neil drove around to the front gate with the car. Then Ruth ran into Aunt Sarah’s room to kiss her good-bye. But Aunt Sarah had always lived a life apart from the general existence of the Corner House family and paid little attention to what her nieces did save to criticise. Mrs. McCall was busy this day preserving—“up tae ma eyen in wark, ma lassie”—and Ruth kissed her, called good-bye to Linda, and ran to the front door before any of the three actually realized what was afoot.

Agnes ran with her to the street. At the gate stood a dark-faced, brilliantly dressed young woman, with huge gold rings in her ears, several other pieces of jewelry worn in sight, and a flashing smile as she halted the Kenway sisters with outstretched hand.

“Will the young ladies let me read their palms?” she said suavely. “I can tell them the good fortune.”

“Oh, dear me!” exclaimed Agnes, pushing by the Gypsy. “We can’t stop to have our fortunes told now.”

Ruth kept right on to the car.

“Do not neglect the opportunity of having the good fortune told, young ladies,” said the Gypsy girl shrewdly. “I can see that trouble is feared. The dark young lady goes on a journey because of the threat of ill fortune. Perhaps it is not so bad as it seems.”

Agnes was really impressed. Left to herself she actually would have heeded the Gypsy’s words. But Ruth hurried into the car, Neale reached back and slammed the tonneau door, and they were off for the station with only a few minutes to catch the twelve-fifty train.

“There!” ejaculated Agnes, standing at the curb to wave her hand and look after the car.

“The blonde young lady does not believe the Gypsy can tell her something that will happen—and in the near future?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Agnes. “I don’t know.” And she dragged her gaze from the car and looked doubtfully upon the dark face of the Gypsy girl which was now serious.

The latter said: “Something has sent the dark young lady from home in much haste and anxiety?”

The question was answered of course before it was asked. Any observant person could have seen as much. But Agnes’s interest was attracted and she nodded.

“Had your sister,” the Gypsy girl said, guessing easily enough at the relationship of the two Corner House girls, “not been in such haste, she could have learned something that will change the aspect of the threatened trouble. More news is on the way.”

Agnes was quite startled by this statement. Without explaining further the Gypsy girl glided away, disappearing into Willow Street.

Agnes failed to see, as the Gypsy quite evidently did, the leisurely approach of the telegraph messenger boy with the yellow envelope in his hand and his eyes fixed upon the old Corner House.

Agnes ran within quickly. She was more than a little impressed by the Gypsy girl’s words, and a few minutes later when the front doorbell rang and she took in the second telegram addressed to Ruth, she was pretty well converted to fortune telling as an exact science.

Sammy Pinkney had marched out of the house late at night, as his mother suspected, lugging his heavy extension-bag, with a more vague idea of his immediate destination than was even usual when he set forth on such escapades.

To “run away” seemed to Sammy the only thing for a boy to do when home life and restrictions became in his opinion unbearable. It might be questioned by stern disciplinarians if Mr. and Mrs. Pinkney had properly punished Sammy after he had run away the first few times, the boy would not have been cured of his wanderlust.

Fortunately, although Sammy’s father was stern enough, he very well knew that this desire for wandering could not be beaten out of the boy. Merely if he were beaten, when he grew big enough to fend for himself in the world, he would leave home and never return rather than face corporal punishment.

“I was just such a kid when I was his age,” admitted Mr. Pinkney. “My father licked me for running away, so finally I ran away when I was fourteen, and stayed away. Sammy has less reason for leaving home than I had, and he’ll get over his foolishness, get a better education than I obtained, and be a better man, I hope, in the end. It’s in the Pinkney blood to rove.”

This, of course, while perhaps being satisfactory to a man, did not at all calm Sammy’s mother. She expected the very worst to happen to her son every time he disappeared; and as has been shown on this occasion, the boy’s absence stirred the community to its very dregs.

Had Mrs. Pinkney known that after tramping as far as the outskirts of the town, and almost dropping from exhaustion, Sammy had gone to bed on a pile of straw in an empty cow stable, she would have been even more troubled than she was.

Sammy, however, came to no harm. He slept so soundly in fact on the rude couch that it was mid-forenoon before he awoke—stiff, sore in muscles, clamorously hungry, and in a frame of mind to go immediately home and beg for breakfast.

He had more money tied up in his handkerchief, however, than he had ever possessed before when he had run away. There was a store in sight at the roadside not far ahead. He hid his bag in the bushes and bought crackers, ham, cheese, and a big bottle of sarsaparilla, and so made a hearty if not judicious breakfast and lunch.

At least, this picnic meal cured the slight attack of homesickness which he suffered. He was no longer for turning back. The whole world was before him and he strode away into it—lugging that extension-bag.

While his troubled mother was showing Agnes Kenway the unmistakable traces of his departure for parts unknown, Sammy was trudging along pretty contentedly, the bag awkwardly knocking against his knees, and his sharp eyes alive to everything that went on along the road.

Sammy had little love for natural history or botany, or anything like that. He suffered preparatory lessons in those branches of enforced knowledge during the school year.

He did not care a bit to know the difference between a gray squirrel and a striped chipmunk. They both chattered at him saucily, and he stopped to try a shot at each of them with his gun.

To Sammy’s mind they were legitimate game. He visualized himself building a fire in a fence corner, skinning and cleaning his game and roasting it over the flames for supper. But the squirrel and the chipmunk visualized quite a different outcome to the adventure and they refused to be shot by the amateur sportsman.

Sammy struck into a road that led across the canal by a curved bridge and right out into a part of the country with which he was not at all familiar. The houses were few and far between, and most of them were set well back from the road.

Sometimes dogs barked at him, but he was not afraid of watch dogs. He did not venture into the yards or up the private lanes. He had bought enough crackers and cheese to make another meal when he should want it. And there were sweet springs beside the road, or in the pastures where the cattle grazed.

Few vehicles passed him in either direction. It was the time of the late hay harvest and everybody was at work in the fields—and usually when he saw the haymakers at all, they were far from the road.

He met no pedestrians at all. Being quite off the line of the railroad, there were no tramps on this road, and of course there was nothing else to harm the boy. His mother, in her anxiety, peopled the world with those that would do Sammy harm. In truth, he was never safer in his life!

But adventure? Why, the world was full of it, and Sammy Pinkney expected to meet any number of exciting incidents as he went on.

“Sammy,” Dot Kenway once said, “has just a wunnerful ’magination. Why! if he sees our old Sandyface creeping through the grass after a poor little field mouse, Sammy can think she’s a whole herd of tigers. His ’magination is just wunnerful!”

CHAPTER VII—THE BRACELET AGAIN TO THE FORE

Having two extremely active and rather willful children in his household had most certainly disturbed Mr. Howbridge out of the rut of his old existence. And Ralph and Rowena quite “turned the ‘ouse hupside down,” to quote Hedden, Mr. Howbridge’s butler.

The moment the twins spied Tess and Dot in the pony phaeton they tore down the stairs from their quarters at the top of the Howbridge house, and flew out of the door to greet the little Corner House girls.

“Oh, Tessie and Dot!” cried Rowena, who looked exactly like her brother, only her hair was now grown long again and she no longer wore boy’s garments, as she had when the Kenways first knew her. “How nice to see you!”

“Where’s Sammy?” Ralph demanded. “Why didn’t he come along, too?”

“We’re glad to see you, Rowena and Rafe,” Tess said sedately.

But Dot replied eagerly to the boy twin:

“Oh, Rafe! what do you think? Sammy’s run away again.”

“Get out!”

“I’m going to,” said Dot, considering Ralph’s ejaculation of amazement an invitation to alight, and she forthwith jumped down from the step of the phaeton.

“You can’t mean that Sammy has run off?” cried Ralph. “Listen to this, Rowdy.”

“What a silly boy!” criticised his sister.

“I don’t know,” chuckled Ralph Birdsall. “’Member how you and I ran away that time, Rowdy?”

“Oh—well,” said his sister. “We had reason for doing so. But you know Sammy Pinkney’s got a father and a mother—And for pity’s sake, Rafe, stop calling me Rowdy.”

“And he’s got a real nice bulldog, too,” added Dot, reflectively considering any possibility why Sammy should run away. “I can’t understand why he does it. He only has to come back home again. I did it once, and I never mean to run away from home again.”

Meanwhile Tess left Ralph to hitch Scalawag while she marched up the stone steps of the Howbridge house to deliver Ruth’s note into Hedden’s hand, who took it at once to Mr. Howbridge.

Dot interested the twins almost immediately in another topic. Rowena naturally was first to spy the silver girdle around the Alice-doll’s waist.

“What a splendid belt!” cried Rowena Birdsall. “Is it real silver, Dot?”

“It—it’s fretful silver,” replied the littlest Corner House girl. “Isn’t it pretty?”

“Why,” declared Ralph after an examination, “it’s an old, old bracelet.”

“Well, it is old, I s’pose,” admitted Dot. “But my Alice-doll doesn’t know that. She thinks it is a brand new belt. But of course she can’t wear it every day, for half the time the bracelet belongs to Tess.”

This statement naturally aroused the twins’ curiosity, and when Tess ran back to join them in the front yard the story of the Gypsy basket and the finding of the bracelet lost nothing of detail by being narrated by both of the Corner House girls.

“Oh, my!” cried Rowena. “Maybe those Gypsies are just waiting to grab you. Gypsies steal children sometimes. Don’t they, Rafe?”

“Course they do,” agreed her twin.

Dot looked rather frightened at this suggestion, but Tess scorned the possibility.

“Why, how foolish,” she declared. “Dot and I were lost once—all by ourselves. Even Tom Jonah wasn’t with us. Weren’t we, Dot? And we slept out under a tree all night, and a nice Gypsy woman found us in the morning and took us to her camp. Didn’t she, Dot?”

“Oh, yes! And an owl howled at us,” agreed the smaller girl. “And I’d much rather sleep in a Gypsy tent than have owls howl at me.”

“The owl hooted, Dot,” corrected Tess.

“Well, what’s the difference between a hoot and a howl?” demanded Dot, rather crossly. She did so hate to be corrected!

“Well, of course,” said Rowena Birdsall thoughtfully, “if you are acquainted with Gypsies maybe you wouldn’t be scared. But I don’t believe they gave you this bracelet for nothing.”

“No,” agreed Dot quickly. “For forty-five cents. And we still owe Sammy Pinkney twenty-five cents of it. And he’s run away.”

So they got around again to the first exciting piece of news Tess and Dot had brought, and were discussing that when Mr. Howbridge came out to speak to the little visitors, giving them his written answer to Ruth’s note. He heard about Sammy’s escapade and some mention of the Gypsies.

“Well,” he chuckled, “if Sammy Pinkney has been carried off by the Gypsies, I sympathize with the Gypsies. I have a very vivid recollection of how much trouble Sammy can make—and without half trying.

“Now, children, give my note to Ruth. I am very sorry that Luke Shepard is ill. If he does not at once recover it may be well to bring him here to Milton. With his aunt only just recovering from her illness, it would be unwise to take the boy home.”

This he said more to himself than to the little girls. Because of their errand Tess and Dot could remain no longer. Ralph unhitched the pony and Tess drove away.

Around the very first corner they spied a dusty, rather battered touring-car just moving away. A big, dark man, with gold hoops in his ears, was driving it. There was a brilliantly dressed young woman in the tonneau, which was otherwise filled with boxes, baskets, a crate of fruit, and odd-shaped packages.

“Oh, Tess!” squealed Dot. “See there!”

“Oh, Dot!” rejoined her sister quite as excitedly. “That is the young Gypsy lady.”

“Oh-oo!” moaned Dot. “Have we got to give her back this fretful silver bracelet, Tessie?”

“We must try,” declared Tess firmly. “Ruth says so. Get up, Scalawag! Come on—hurry! We must catch them.”

The touring-car was going away from the pony-phaeton. Scalawag objected very much to going faster than his usual easy jog trot—unless it were to dance behind a band! He didn’t care to overtake the Gypsies’ motor-car.

And that car was going faster and faster. Tess stopped talking to the aggravating Scalawag and lifted up her voice to shout after the Gypsies.

“Oh, stop! Stop!” she called. “Miss—Miss Gypsy! We’ve got something for you! Why, Dot, you are not hollering at all!”

“I—I’m trying to,” wailed the smaller girl. “But I do so hate to make Alice give up her belt.”

The Gypsy turned his car into a cross street ahead and disappeared. When Scalawag brought the Corner House girls to that corner the car was so far away that the girls’ voices at their loudest pitch could not have reached the ears of the Romany folk.

“Now, just see! We’ll never be able to give that bracelet back if you don’t do your share of the hollering, Dot Kenway,” complained Tess.

“I—I will,” promised Dot. “Anyway, I will when it’s your turn to wear the bracelet.”

The little girls reached home again at a time when the whole Corner House family seemed disrupted. To the amazement of Tess and Dot their sister Ruth had departed for the mountains. Neale had only just then returned from seeing her aboard the train.

“And it’s too late to stop her, never mind what Mr. Howbridge says in this note,” cried Agnes. “That foolish Cecile! Here is the second half of her telegraph message,” and she read it aloud again:

“Until afternoon; will wire you then how he is.”

“Crickey!” gasped Neale, red in the face with laughter, and taking the two telegrams to read them in conjunction:

“Arrived Oakhurst. They will not let me see Luke until afternoon. Will wire you then how he is.”

“Isn’t that just like a girl?”

“No more like a girl than it is like a boy,” snapped Agnes. “I’m sure all the brains in the world are not of the masculine gender.”

“I stand corrected,” meekly agreed her friend. “Just the same, I don’t think that even you, Aggie, would award Cecile Shepard a medal for perspicuity.”

“Why—why,” gasped the listening Dot, “has Cecile got one of those things the matter with her? I thought it was Luke who got hurt?”

“You are perfectly right, Dottie,” said Agnes, before Neale could laugh at the little girl. “It is Luke who is hurt. But this Neale O’Neil is very likely to dislocate his jaw if he pronounces many such big words. He is only showing off.”

“Squelched!” admitted Neale good-naturedly. “Well, what do you wish done with the car? Shall I put it up? Can’t chase Ruth’s train in it, and bring her back.”

“You might chase the Gypsies,” suggested Tess slowly. “We saw them again—Dot and me.”

“Oh! The Gypsies? What do you think, Neale? I do believe there is something in that fortune-telling business,” Agnes cried.

“I bet there is,” agreed Neale. “Money for the Gypsies.”

But Agnes repeated what the Gypsy girl had said to Ruth and herself just as the elder Corner House girl was starting for the train.

“I saw that Gyp of course,” agreed Neale. “But, pshaw! she only just guessed. Of course there isn’t any truth in what those fortune tellers hand you. Not much!”

“There was something in that basket they handed Tess and me,” said Dot, complacently eyeing the silver girdle on the Alice-doll.

“Say! About that bracelet, Aggie,” broke in Neale. “Do you know what I believe?”

“What, Neale?”

“I believe those Gypsies must have stolen it. Then they got scared, thinking that the police were after them, and the women dropped it into the basket the kids bought, believing they could get the bracelet back when it was safe for them to do so.”

“Do you really suppose that is the explanation?”

“I am afraid the bracelet is ‘stolen goods.’ Perhaps the children had better not carry it away from the house any more. Or until we are sure. The police—”

“Mercy me, Neale! you surely would not tell the police about the bracelet?”

“Not yet. But I was going to suggest to Ruth that she advertise the bracelet in the Milton Morning Post. Advertise it in the ‘Lost and Found’ column, just as though it had been picked up somewhere. Then let us see if the Gypsies—or somebody else—comes after it.”

“And if somebody does?”

“Well, we can always refuse to give it up until ownership is proved,” declared Neale.

“All right. Let’s advertise it at once. We needn’t wait for Ruth to come back,” said the energetic Agnes. “How should such an advertisement be worded, Neale?”

They proceeded to evolve a reading notice advertising the finding of the silver bracelet, which when published added not a little to the complications of the matter.

CHAPTER VIII—THE MISFORTUNES OF A RUNAWAY

Mr. Pinkney, however, labored under the delusion that because Sammy was piratically inclined, he would head toward the sea. So he got in touch with people all along the railroad line to Pleasant Cove, suspecting that the boy might have purchased a ticket in that direction with a part of the contents of his burglarized bank.

The nearest thing to the sea that Sammy came to after passing the canal on the edge of Milton was a big pond which he sighted about mid-afternoon. Its dancing blue waters looked very cool and refreshing, and the young traveler thought of his bathing suit right away.

“I can hide this bag and take a swim,” he thought eagerly. “I bet that pond is all right. Hullo! There’s some kids. I wonder if they would steal my things if I go in swimming?”

He was not incautious. Being mischievously inclined himself, he suspected other boys of having similar propensities. The boys he had observed were playing down by the water’s edge where an ice-house had once stood. But the building had been destroyed by fire, all but its roof. The eaves of this shingled roof, which was quite intact, now rested on the ground.

The boys were sliding from the ridge of the roof to the ground, and then climbing up again to repeat the performance. It looked to be a lot of fun.

After Sammy had hidden his extension-bag in a clump of bushes, he approached the slide. One boy, who was the largest and oldest of the group, called to Sammy:

“Come on, kid. Try it. The slide’s free.”

It looked to be real sport, and Sammy could not resist the invitation given so frankly. He saw that the bigger boy sat on a piece of board when he slid down the shingles; but the others slid on the seat of their trousers—and so did Sammy.

It proved to be an hilarious occasion. One might have heard those boys shouting and laughing a mile away.

A series of races were held, and Sammy Pinkney managed to win his share of them. This so excited him that he failed for all of the time to notice what fatal effect the friction was having upon his trousers.

He was suddenly reminded, however, by a startling happening. All the shingles on that roof were not worn smooth. Some were “splintery.” Sammy emitted a sharp cry as he reached the ground after a particularly swift descent of the roof, and rising, he clapped his hand to that part of his anatomy upon which he had been tobogganing, with a most rueful expression on his countenance.

“Oh, my! Oh, my!” cried Sammy. “I’ve got two big holes worn right through my pants! My good pants, too. My maw will give me fits, so she will. I’ll never dare go home now.”

The big boy who had saved his own trousers from disaster by using the piece of board to slide on, shouted with laughter. But another of the party said to Sammy:

“Don’t tell your mother. I aren’t going to tell my mother, you bet. By and by she’ll find the holes and think they just wore through naturally.”

“Well,” said Sammy, with a sigh, “I guess I’ve slid down enough for to-day, anyway. Good-bye, you fellers, I’ll see you later.”

He did not feel at all as cheerful as he spoke. He was really smitten with remorse, for this was almost a new suit he had on. He wished heartily that he had put on that cowboy suit—even his bathing suit—before joining that coasting party.

“That big feller,” grumbled Sammy, “is a foxy one, he is! He didn’t wear through his pants, you bet. But me—”

Sammy was very much lowered in his own estimation over this mishap. He was by no means so smart as he had believed himself to be. He felt gingerly from time to time of the holes in his trousers. They were of such a nature that they could scarcely be hidden.

“Crickey!” he muttered, “she sure will give me fits.”

The boys he had been playing with disappeared. Sammy secured his bag and suddenly found it very, very heavy. Evening was approaching. The sun was so low now that its almost level rays shone into his eyes as he plodded along the road.

A farmer going to Milton market in an auto-truck, its load covered with a brown tarpaulin, passed Sammy. If it had not been for the holes in his trousers, and what his mother would do and say about it, the boy surely would have asked the farmer for a ride back home!

His hesitancy cost him the ride. And he met nobody else on this road he was traveling. He struggled on, his courage beginning to ebb. He had eaten the last crumbs of his lunch. After the pond was out of sight behind him the runaway saw no dwellings at all. The road had entered a wood, and that wood grew thicker and darker as he advanced.

Fireflies twinkled in the bushes. There was a hum of insect life and somewhere a big bullfrog tuned his bassoon—a most eerie sound. A bat flew low above his head and Sammy dodged, uttering a startled squawk.

“Crickey! I don’t like this a bit,” he panted.

But the runaway was no coward. He was quite sure that there was nothing in these woods that would really hurt him. He could still see some distance back from the road on either hand, and he selected a big chestnut tree at the foot of which, between two roots, there was a hollow filled with leaves and trash.

This made not a bad couch, as he very soon found. He thrust the bag that had become so heavy farther into the hollow and lay down before it. But tired as he was, he could not at once go to sleep.

Somewhere near he heard a trickle of water. The sound made the boy thirsty. He finally got up and stumbled through the brush, along the roadside in the direction of the running water.

He found it—a spring rising in the bank above the road. Sammy carried a pocket-cup and soon satisfied his thirst by its aid. He had some difficulty in finding his former nest; but when he did come to the hollow between two huge roots, with the broadly spreading chestnut tree boughs overhead, he soon fell asleep.

Nothing disturbed Sammy thereafter until it was broad daylight. He awoke as much refreshed as though he had slept in his own bed at home.

Young muscles recover quickly from strain. All he remembered, too, was the fun he had had the day before, while he was foot-loose. Even the disaster to his trousers seemed of little moment now. He had always envied ragged urchins; they seemed to have so few cares and nobody to bother them.

He ran with a whoop to the spring, drank his fill from it, and then doused his face and hands therein. The sun and air dried his head after his ablutions and there was nobody to ask if “he had washed behind his ears.”

He returned to the chestnut tree where he had lain all night, whistling. Of course he was hungry; but he believed there must be some house along the road where he could buy breakfast. Sammy Pinkney was not at all troubled by his situation until, stooping to look into the cavity near which he had slept, he made the disconcerting discovery that his extension-bag was not there!

“Wha—wha—what?” stammered Sammy. “It’s gone! Who took it?”

That he had been robbed while he went to the spring was the only explanation there could be of this mysterious disappearance. At least, so thought Sammy.

He ran around the tree, staring all about—even up into the thickly leaved branches where the clusters of green burrs were already formed. Then he plunged through the fringe of bushes into the road to see if he could spy the robber making away in either direction.

All he saw was a rabbit hopping placidly across the highway. A jay flew overhead with raucous call, as though he laughed at the bereft boy. And Sammy Pinkney was in no mood to stand being laughed at!

“You mean old thing!” he shouted at the flashing jay—which merely laughed at him again, just as though he did know who had stolen Sammy’s bag and hugely enjoyed the joke.

In that bag were many things that Sammy considered precious as well as necessary articles of clothing. There was his gun and the shot for it! How could he defend himself from attack or shoot game in the wilds, if either became necessary?

“Oh, dear!” Sammy finally sniffed, not above crying a few tears as there was nobody by to see. “Oh, dear! Now I’ve got to wear this good suit—although ’tain’t so good anyway with holes in the pants.

“But all my other things—crickey! Ain’t it just mean? Whoever took my bag, I hope he’ll have the baddest kind of luck. I—I hope he’ll have to go to the dentist’s and have all his teeth pulled, so I do!” which, from a recent experience of the runaway, seemed the most painful punishment that could be exacted from the thief.

Wishing any amount of ill-fortune for the robber would not bring back his bag. Sammy quite realized this. He had his money safely tied into a very grubby handkerchief, so that was all right. But when he started off along the road at last, he was in no very cheerful frame of mind.

CHAPTER IX—THINGS GO WRONG

Meanwhile, Mrs. McCall’s preserve jars did not seal well, and the next day the work had to be done all over again. Linda cut her finger “to the bone,” as she gloomily announced. And Uncle Rufus lost a silver dollar somewhere in the grass while he was mowing the lawn.

“An’ dollars is as scarce wid me as dem hen’s teef dey talks about,” said the old darkey. “An’ I never yet did see a hen wid teef—an’ Ah reckon I’ve seen a million of ’em.”

“Oh-oo!” murmured Dot Kenway. “A million hens, Unc’ Rufus? Is there that many?”

“He, he!” chuckled the old man. “Ain’t that the beatenes’ chile dat ever was? Always a-questionin’ an’ a-questionin’. Yo’ can’t git by wid any sprodigious statement when she is around—no, suh!”

Nor could such an expression as “sprodigious” go unchallenged with Dot on the scene—no, indeed! A big word in any case attracted Miss Dorothy.

“What does that mean, Unc’ Rufus?” she promptly demanded. “Is—is ‘sprodigious’ a dictionary word, or just one of your made-up words?”

“Go ‘long chile!” chuckled the old man. “Can’t Uncle Rufus make up words just as good as any dictionary-man? If I knows what Ah wants to say, Ah says it, ne’er mind de dictionary!”

“That’s all very well, Unc’ Rufus,” Tess put in. “But Ruthie only wants us to use language that you find in books. So I guess you’d better not take that one from Uncle Rufus, Dottie.”

“Howcome Missy Ruth so pertic’lar?” grumbled the old man. “Yo’ little gals is gettin’ too much l’arnin’—suah is! But none of hit don’t find de ol’ man his dollar.”

At this complaint Tess and Dot went to work immediately to hunt for the missing dollar. It was while they were searching along the hedgerow next to the Creamers’ premises that the little girls got into their memorable argument with Mabel Creamer about the lobster—an argument, which, being overheard by Agnes, was reported to the family with much hilarity.

Mabel, an energetic and sharp-tongued child, and Bubby, her little brother, were playing in their yard. That is, Bubby was playing while Mabel nagged and thwarted him in almost everything he wanted to do.

“Now, don’t stoop over like that, Bubby. Your face gets all red like a lobster does. Maybe you’ll turn into one.”

“I ain’t a lobs’er,” shouted Bubby.

“You will be one if you get red like that,” repeated his sister in a most aggravating way.

“I won’t be a lobs’er!” wailed Bubby.

“Of course you won’t be a lobster, Bubby,” spoke up Tess from across the hedge. “You’re just a boy.”

“Course I’s a boy,” declared Bubby stoutly, sensing that Tess Kenway’s assurance was half a criticism. “I don’t want to be a lobs’er—nor a dirl, so there!”

“Oh-oo!” gasped Dot.

“You will be a lobster and turn all red if you are a bad boy,” declared Mabel, who was always in a bad temper when she was made to mind Bubby.

“Why, Mabel,” murmured Dot, who knew a thing or two about lobsters herself, “you wouldn’t boil Bubby, would you?”

“Don’t have to boil ’em to make ’em turn red,” declared Mabel, referring to the lobster, not the boy. “My father brought home live lobsters once and the big one got out of the basket on to the kitchen floor.”

“Oh, my!” exclaimed the interested Dot. “What happened?”

With her imagination thus spurred by appreciation, Mabel pursued the fancy: “And there were three little ones in the basket, and that old, big lobster tried to make them get out on the floor too. And when they wouldn’t, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” breathed Dot.

“Why, he got so mad at them that he turned red all over. I saw him—”

“Why, Mabel Creamer!” interrupted Tess, unable to listen further to such a flight of fancy without registering a protest. “That can’t be so—you know it can’t.”

“I’d like to know why it can’t be so?” demanded Mabel.

“’Cause lobsters only turn red when they are boiled. They are all green when they are alive.”

“How do you know so much, Tess Kenway?” cried Mabel. “These are my lobsters and I’ll have them turn blue if I want to—so there!”

There seemed to be no room for further argument. Besides, Mabel grabbed Bubby by the hand and dragged him away from the hedge.

“My!” murmured Dot, “Mabel has such a ‘magination. And maybe that lobster did get mad, Tess. We don’t know.”

“She never had a live lobster in her family,” declared Tess, quite emphatically. “You know very well, Dot Kenway, that Mr. Creamer wouldn’t bring home such a thing as a live lobster, when there are little children in his house.”

“M—mm—I guess that’s so,” agreed Dot. “A live lobster would be worse than Sammy Pinkney’s bulldog.”

Thus reminded of the absent Sammy the two smaller Corner House girls postponed any further search for Uncle Rufus’s dollar and went across the street to learn if any news had been gained of their runaway playmate. Mrs. Pinkney was still despairing. She had imagined already a score of misfortunes that might have befallen her absent son, ranging from his eating of green apples to being run over by an automobile.

“But, Mrs. Pinkney!” burst forth Tess at last, “if Sammy has run away to sea to be a pirate, there won’t be any green apples for him to eat—and no automobiles.”

“Oh, you can never tell what trouble Sammy Pinkney will manage to get into,” moaned his mother. “I can only expect the very worst.”

“Well,” Dot remarked with a sigh, as she and Tess trudged home to supper, “I’m glad there is only one boy in my family. My boy doll, Nosmo King Kenway, will probably be a source of great anxiety when he is older.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Tess told her placidly. “If he is very bad you can send him to the reform school.”

“Oh—oo!” gasped Dot, all her maternal instincts aroused at such a suggestion. “That would be awful.”

“I don’t know. They do send boys to the reform school. Jimmy Mulligan, whose mother lives in that little house on Willow Wythe, is in the reform school because he wouldn’t mind his mother.”

“But they don’t send Sammy there,” urged Dot.

“No—o. Of course,” admitted the really tender-hearted Tess, “we know Sammy isn’t really naughty. He is only silly to run away every once in a while.”

There was much bustle inside the old Corner House that evening. Because they really missed Ruth so much, her sisters invented divers occupations to fill the hours until bedtime. Tess and Dot, for instance, had never cut out so many paper-dolls in all their lives.

Another telegram had arrived from Cecile Shepard (sent, of course, before Ruth had reached Oakhurst), stating that she had been allowed to see her brother and that, although he could not be immediately moved, he was improving and was absolutely in no danger.

“If Ruthie had only waited to get this message,” complained Agnes, “she would not have gone up there to the mountains at all. And just see, Neale, how right that Gypsy girl was. There was news on the way that changed the whole aspect of affairs. She was quite wonderful, I think.”

By this time Neale saw that it was better not to try to ridicule Agnes’ budding belief in fortune telling. “Less said, the soonest mended,” was his wise opinion.

“I like Cecile Shepard,” Agnes went on to say, “and always shall; but I don’t think she has shown much sense about her brother’s illness. Scaring everybody to death, and sending telegrams like a patch-work quilt!”

“Maybe Ruth will come right home again when she finds Luke is all right,” said Tess hopefully. “Dear, me! aren’t boys a lot of trouble?”

“Sammy and Luke are,” agreed Dot.

“All but Neale,” said the loyal Agnes, her boy chum having departed. “I don’t see what this family would do without Neale O’Neil.”

In the morning the older sister’s absence seemed to make quite as great a gap in the household of the old Corner House as at night. But Neale rushed in early with the morning paper to show Agnes their advertisement in print. Under the “Lost and Found” heading appeared the following:

“FOUND:—Silver bracelet, antique design. Owner can regain it by proving property and paying for this advertisement. Apply Kenway, Willow and Main Streets.”

“It sounds quite dignified,” decided Agnes admiringly. “I guess Ruth would approve.”

“Crickey!” ejaculated Neale O’Neil, “this is one thing Ruth is not bossing. We did this off our own bat, Aggie.”

“Just the same,” ruminated Agnes, “I wonder what Mr. Howbridge will say if he reads it?”

“I am glad,” said Neale with gratitude, “that my father doesn’t interfere with what I do. And I haven’t any guardian, unless it is dear old Con Murphy. Folks let me pretty much alone.”

“If they didn’t,” said Agnes saucily, “I suppose you would run away as you did from the circus.”

“No,” laughed her chum. “One runaway in the neighborhood is enough. Mr. Pinkney has been up half the night, he tells me, telephoning and sending telegrams. He has about made up his mind that Sammy hasn’t gone in the direction of Pleasant Cove, after all.”

“We ought to help hunt for Sammy,” cried Agnes eagerly. “Let us take Mrs. Pinkney in the auto, Neale, and search for that little rascal.”

“No. She will not leave the house. She wants to greet Sammy when he comes back—no matter whether it is day or night,” chuckled Neale. “But Mr. Pinkney is going to get away from the office this afternoon, and we’ll take him. He is afraid his wife will be really ill.”

“Poor woman!”

“She cannot be contented to sit down and wait for Sammy to turn up—as he always does.”

“You mean, he always gets turned up,” giggled Agnes. “Somebody is sure to find him.”

“Well, then, it might as well be us,” agreed Neale. “I’ll tune up the engine, and see that the car is all right. We should be able to go over a lot of these roads in an afternoon. Sammy could not have got very far from Milton in two days, or less.”