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 girls 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 Sammys 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 hell get over his foolishness, get a better education than I obtained, and be a better man, I hope, in the end. Its in the Pinkney blood to rove.
This, of course, while perhaps being satisfactory to a man, did not at all calm Sammys mother. She expected the very worst to happen to her son every time he disappeared; and as has been shown on this occasion, the boys 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 Sammys 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.