The Corner House Girls Growing Up Part 10

"That iss the Pinkney boy!" she cried. "If he was _my_ brudder--"

Mrs. MacCall, called by the clatter, ran out. Aunt Sarah Maltby, even, appeared at the door, while Uncle Rufus limped up from the hen houses mildly demanding:

"What's done happen' to dem cats? Don't I hear dem prognosticatin'

about, somewhar's?"

"Sammy Pinkney!" cried Mrs. MacCall, the first to spy the boy at the window of the little girls' play-room, "what are you doing up there?"

"He's got the cat and the kittens in that basket. Did you ever?"

exclaimed Aunt Sarah.

"You naughty boy!" commanded Mrs. MacCall, "you pull that thing right back here and let poor Sandyface out."

"I can't, Mrs. MacCall," woefully declared the boy who wanted to be a pirate.

"Then pull it over to your house," said the housekeeper.

"I--I can't do that either," confessed Sammy.

"Why not, I should admire to know?" demanded Aunt Sarah.

"'Cause it's stuck," gloomily explained Sammy. "I can't pull it one way, nor yet the other. Oh, dear! I wish that cat would stop yowling!"

What he feared happened at that moment. His mother, hearing the commotion in the street and seeing a crowd beginning to gather, ran out of the house. She was always expecting something to happen to Sammy; and if a crowd gathered anywhere near the house she surmised the most dreadful peril for her son.

"Sammy! Sammy!" she shrieked. "What has become of Sammy?"

"Here I am, Ma," replied Sammy, with disgust.

"What's the matter with you? Come home this minute!" commanded Mrs.

Pinkney, who was a rather near-sighted woman, and having run out without her gla.s.ses she did not spy her son in the window of the Corner House.

"I--I can't," confessed the boy, rather shaken.

At that moment Mrs. Pinkney saw the neighbors pointing upward, and hearing them say: "See up there? In the basket! The poor thing!" she naturally thought they referred to the peril of her young son.

"Oh, Sammy Pinkney! But you just wait till your father gets home to-night!" she cried, trying to peer up at the wire. "I knew you'd get into mischief with that thing Neale O'Neil strung up there. Whatever has the boy tried to do? Walk tight-rope?"

"It's in the basket," somebody tried to explain to her.

That was too much for the excitable Mrs. Pinkney.

"He'll fall out of it! Of course he will. And break his precious neck!

Oh, get a blanket! Some of you run for the fire ladders! How will we get him down?"

She sat down on the gra.s.s, threw her ap.r.o.n over her head, and refused to look upward at the wire carrier in which Sandyface and her kittens were suspended, and out of which she expected her reckless son to fall at any moment.

It was at this exciting moment, and into the hubbub made by the neighbors and Sandyface, that the automobile party whizzed around the corner. Neale brought the car to a sudden stop and everybody screamed.

"That Sammy Pinkney!" gasped Tess, in despair. "I just _knew_ he'd get into something!"

CHAPTER VIII

NEIGHBOR

What with Mrs. Pinkney almost in hysterics, Tom Jonah barking, the goat blatting, Aunt Sarah scolding, and the neighbors in a general uproar, it was scarcely possible for anybody to make himself heard.

Therefore Neale said nothing. He hopped out from behind the steering wheel of the touring car and ran into the back premises, from which he dragged the tall fruit-picking ladder that Uncle Rufus had stowed away.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Neale reached up with a rake and unhooked the hanging basket"]

Fortunately before any excited person turned in a fire alarm, Neale, with the help of Luke Shepard and Uncle Rufus, set up the step-ladder directly under the squalling cat and her kittens. From the top step, on which he perched precariously with Luke and the old negro steadying the ladder, Neale reached up with a rake and unhooked the hanging basket from the tramway.

It was rather a delicate piece of work, and the children were scarcely a.s.sured of Sandyface's safety--nor was the old cat sure of it herself--until Neale, hanging the basket on the reversed garden rake, lowered the entire family to the ground.

"Sartain suah am glad to see dat ol' coat ob' mine again," mumbled Uncle Rufus, as everybody else was congratulating one another upon the safety of the cats. "I had a paper dollar tucked away ag'in some time w'en I'd need it, in de inside pocket of dat ol' coat. It moughty near got clean 'way f'om me, 'cause of dat boy's foolishness. Sartain suah am de baddes' boy I ever seen."

The consensus of opinion seemed to follow the bent of Uncle Rufus' mind.

Sammy was in evil repute in the neighborhood in any case; this was considered the capsheaf.

Had it not been that the aerial tramway was so securely affixed to the two houses, and to take it down would be to deprive Tess, who was innocent, of some amus.e.m.e.nt, Mrs. Pinkney would have ordered the connections between the two houses severed at once.

As it was, she drove the shamefaced Sammy into the house ahead of her, and some of his boy acquaintances, lingering with ghoulish curiosity outside, heard unmistakable sounds of punishment being inflicted upon the culprit.

He was then sent up to his room to meditate. And just outside his screened window was the tantalizing tramway which Neale had repaired and which was again in good working order.

Sammy had been forbidden to use the new plaything; but the little Corner House girls soon began to feel sorry for him. Even Tess thought that his punishment was too hard.

"For he didn't really hurt Sandyface and the kittens. Only scared 'em,"

she said.

"But s'pose they'd've got dizzy and fell out--like I did out of the swing?" Dot observed, inclined to make the matter more serious even than her sister. "_Then_ what would have happened?"

Tess nevertheless felt sorry for the culprit, and seeing his woe-begone and tear-stained face pressed close to his chamber window, she wrote the following on a piece of pasteboard, stood it upright in the basket and drew it across so that Sammy might read it:

DONT MINE SAmmY WE Ar SORRY THe CATS AR Al RITE DOT & TESS

The "_cat_astrophy" as Neale insisted upon calling the accident, threw some gloom into an otherwise pleasant day--for the little girls at least. And that evening something else was discovered that sent Dot to bed in almost as low a state of mind as that with which Sammy Pinkney retired.

This second unfortunate incident happened after supper, when they were all gathered in the sitting room, Neale, too, being present. Luke asked Dot if she had decided upon a name for the new baby.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Luke," the smallest Corner House girl replied. "The sailor-baby was christened to-day. Didn't you know!"

"I hadn't heard about it," he confessed. "What is he called?"