The Corner House Girls Growing Up

He carefully drew the basket out upon the wire, away from the house. Sandyface lifted her head; but as she was very comfortable and had her family with her, she made no great objection as the basket swung out into space.

"Je-ru-sa-lem!" gasped Sammy, with fearful joy. "Bet that old basket would hold all the other cats too. Wish I had the bunch of 'em – Spotty, and Almira, and Popocatepetl, and Bungle, and Starboard, Port, Hard-a-Lee and Main-sheet! And Almira's got four kittens of her own somewhere. And so's Popocatepetl. Whew! that makes – makes – "

But Sammy did not like arithmetic enough to figure up this sum; and he did not seem to have fingers enough just then to count them. So he gave it up. A cat and four kittens swinging out over Willow Street, with all the winds of heaven blowing about them, should have satisfied even Sammy Pinkney.

The boy pulled the basket cautiously to the extreme end of the wire – until the carrier bumped against the clapboards under his own bedroom window. He saw Sandyface raise her head again and glare around. Half asleep until this time she had not realized that she and her babies were being so marvelously transported from their own home to the cottage where Sammy resided.

"Crickey!" exclaimed the boy suddenly. "If mother comes out and sees 'em – or if that there bulldog Buster hears those cats meowing, there'll be trouble over there."

He started anxiously to draw the cats and the carrier back to the Corner House. In some way the line by which he drew the basket became fouled at the other end; or the pulleys on the wire became chocked. Sammy could not tell just what the trouble was, anyway.

But to his dismay the basket stuck midway of the line. High over the middle of Willow Street it stopped, and Sandyface was now standing up and telling the neighborhood just how scared she felt for her babies and herself.

"Lie down, cat!" the perturbed Sammy cried to her. "You'll fall overboard and drown – I mean, break your silly neck! S-st! Lie down!"

Tom Jonah, the old house dog, appeared suddenly below and began to bark. Billy Bumps came galloping around the house, shook his horns in disapproval, and "bla-ated" loudly.

Linda came to the kitchen door, beheld the cat in the basket high on the wire, and seemed to understand the cause of the trouble with uncanny certainty.

"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 glasses 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 grass, threw her apron 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.

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 assured 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 amusement, 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