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