The Corner House Girls Growing Up Part 18

"And d'juno, Ruthie, that they are going to stop people from keeping pigs inside the city limits? Mr. Con Murphy can't have his any more, either. For the other day a pig that belonged to Hemstret, the butcher, got away and scared folks awful on Deering Street, 'cause he looked as though he had the yaller janders--"

"The _what_?" gasped her sister, while Luke actually roared.

"The yaller janders," repeated Tessie.

"Do you mean the yellow jaundice? Though how a pig could get such a disease--"

"Maybe. Anyway he was all yellow," Tess went on excitedly. "'Cause some boys took some ock-er-ra paint out of Mr. Timmins' shop--Timmins, the lame man, you know--and painted him and then let him out."

"Painted Mr. Timmins--the lame man?" gasped Luke, in the midst of his laughter.

"No. The pig that I was telling you about," said the small girl. "And Mrs. Bogert says that the next time Bogert goes to the lodge and stays till two o'clock in the morning, she's going home to her mother and take the children with her," and Tess ended this budget of news almost breathless.

Ruth had to laugh, too, although she did not approve of the children carrying such gossip. "I should know you had called upon Miss Ann t.i.tus," she observed. "I hope you didn't hear anything worse than this."

"I heard her canary sing," confessed Tess; "and her little dog, Wopsy, was snoring dreadfully on the sofa. But I guess I didn't hear anything else. Where's Dot?"

"I'm sure I do not know," Ruth said placidly, while Luke wiped his eyes, still chuckling in a subdued way. He saw that he was beginning to hurt Tess' feelings and he was too kind-hearted to wish to do that. "Dot must be somewhere about the house."

Tess went to look for her. Her tender conscience punished her for having spoken to her little sister so shortly when she was starting on her errand to Miss Ann t.i.tus. But how else could she have gotten rid of the "tagging" Dorothy!

Just now, however, Dot seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. n.o.body had seen her for more than an hour. Tess went to the fence between their own and the Creamers' yard and "hoo-hooed" until Mabel appeared.

"Ain't seen her," declared that young person, shaking her head. "I tried to get you and her over here a long time ago. My mother let me make some 'la.s.ses taffy, and I wanted you and Dot to come and help. But I had to do it all alone."

"Was it good?" asked Tess, longingly.

"It _looked_ luscious," admitted Mabel scowling. "But that young 'un got at it when it was cooling on the porch and filled it full of gravel. I broke a tooth trying to eat a piece. Want some, Tess?"

"No-o," Tess said. "I guess not. I must find Dot."

But she did not find Dot. She wandered back to the front of the Corner House just as Mrs. Pinkney, rather wild-eyed and disheveled, appeared at the side fence on Willow Street and called to Ruth:

"Have you seen Sammy?"

"Have you seen Dot?" repeated Tess, quite as earnestly.

Ruth was finally shaken out of her composure. She rose from her seat, folding the work in her lap, and demanded:

"What do you suppose has become of them? For of course, if neither Sammy nor Dot can be found, they have gone off somewhere together."

CHAPTER XIII

THE HUE AND CRY

Ruth Kenway's suggestion bore the stamp of common sense, and even the excited mother of Sammy Pinkney accepted that as a fact. Sammy had been playing almost exclusively with the little Corner House girls of late (quite to his anxious mother's satisfaction, be it said) and if Dot was absent the boy was in all probability with her.

"Well, he certainly cannot have got into much mischief with little Dorothy along," sighed Mrs. Pinkney, relieved. "But I most certainly shall punish him when he comes back, for I forbade his leaving the yard this morning. And I shall tell his father."

This last promise made Tess look very serious. It was the most threatening speech that the good woman ever addressed to Sammy. Mr.

Pinkney seemed a good deal like a bugaboo to the little Corner House girls; he was held over Sammy's head often as a threat of dire punishment. Sammy and his father, however, seemed to understand each other pretty well.

Sammy had once confided to the little Corner House girls that "We men have to hang together"; and although he respected his father, and feared what the latter might do in the way of punishment, the punishment was usually inflicted by Mrs. Pinkney, after all.

Sometimes when his mother considered that the boy had been extraordinarily naughty and she told the fact to his father, that wise man would take his son by the hand and walk away with him. Sammy always started on one of these walks with a most serious expression of countenance; but whatever was said to him, or done to him, during these absences, Sammy always returned with a cheerful mien and with a pocketful of goodies for himself and something extra nice for his mother.

Neale O'Neil frequently declared that Mr. Pinkney was one of the wisest men of his time and probably "put it all over old Solomon. They say Solomon had a lot of wives," Neale remarked. "But I bet he didn't know half as much about women and how to handle them as Mr. Pinkney does."

However, to get back to the discovery of the absence of Sammy and Dot.

After Tess had searched the neighborhood without finding any trace of them, and Agnes had returned from down town, a council was held.

"Why, they did not even take Tom Jonah with them," observed Ruth.

"If they had," said Agnes, almost ready to weep, "we would be sure they were not really lost."

"Can't you find out at the police station?" suggested Cecile.

"Oh, my! Oh my!" cried Tess, in horror. "You don't s'pose our Dot has really been _arrested_?"

"Listen to the child!" exclaimed Mrs. Pinkney, kissing her. "Of course not. The young lady means that the police may help find them. But I do not know what Sam'l Pinkney would say if he thought the officers had to look for his son."

Ruth, in her usual decisive way, brooked no further delay. Surely the missing boy and girl had not gone straight up into the air, nor had they sunk into the ground. They could not have traveled far away from the corner of Willow and Main Streets without somebody seeing them who would remember the fact.

She went to the telephone and began calling up people whom she knew all about town, and after explaining to Central the need for her inquiries, that rather tart young person did all in her power to give Ruth quick connections.

Finally she remembered Mrs. Kranz. Dot and Sammy might have gone to Meadow Street, for many of their schoolmates lived in the tenements along that rather poor thoroughfare.

Maria Maroni answered the telephone and she, of course, had news of the lost children.

"Why, Miss Ruth," asked the little Italian girl into the transmitter, "wasn't you going on the picnic, too?"

"What picnic!" asked the eldest Corner House girl at the other end of the wire.

"Mrs. Kranz says Dottie and that little boy were going on a picnic. Sure they were! I sold them crackers and cheese and a lot of things. And my father sent you a basket of fruit like he always does. We thought you and Miss Agnes would be going, too."

Ruth reported this to the others; but the puzzle of the children's absence seemed not at all explained. n.o.body whom Ruth and Agnes asked seemed to know any picnic slated for this day.

"They must have made it up themselves--all their own selves," Agnes declared. "They have gone off alone to picnic."

"Where would they be likely to go?" asked Luke Shepard, wis.h.i.+ng to be helpful. "Is there a park over that way--or some regular picnicking grounds?"

"There's the ca.n.a.l bank," Ruth said quickly. "It's open fields along there. Sometimes the children have gone there with us."

"I just _know_ Sammy has fallen in and been drowned," declared Mrs.