“He’s lost!” said Aunt Mary, bursting into tears. “He’ll get run over, or carried away, or something terrible will happen to him. I shall never have another minute’s peace while I live!”
Tom listened impatiently to the details of the story, told by both together, and, tossing his fan into the hall, started down the steps.
“Don’t fret till I come back. He’s all right somewhere, and I’ll bring him home with me.”
“I’m going back. I can’t stay here. I can help search,” said Aunt Mary, still in tears, and her loyal companion avowed her determination to stand by her.
Tom had hurried away without stopping to listen, and was now out of sight; but the two wretched women, heated, footsore and wearied, followed resolutely after. The scene of the mysterious disappearance was at last reached, and again the oft repeated inquiries were made, but with the same result.
“Here is where I was intending to bring him,” said Aunt Mary, pausing mournfully before the window of a toy-bazar crowded with drums, guns, trumpets and wooden monkeys. “He had talked so much about his rocking-horse, the poor lost lamb! And now—”
The sentence was never finished, for, with a half hysterical shriek, she dropped her parasol upon the sidewalk and rushed into the store, where the apparition of a curly head of flaxen hair, slowly oscillating back and forth, had that instant caught her eye. It was Charlie, sure enough, in the highest feather, mounted upon the back of the largest and realest-looking horse in the entire stock of the establishment, whose speed he was endeavoring to accelerate by the aid of divers kicks and cluckings, while the proprietor and unemployed clerks looked admiringly on.
Aunt Mary, despite her regard for appearances, hugged him and cried over him without stint, and finally made a brave attempt to scold him, but her heart failed her, at the very outset.
“He’s been here nigh upon two hours,” said the proprietor, as he made change for the coveted horse. “He came in alone and went right to that horse, and there he’s stuck ever since. I don’t let boys handle ’em much without I know they’re going to buy, but he made me think so much of a little fellow I lost a year ago that I let him do just as he liked.”
No mishap occurred in getting Charlie home this time. The toyman’s boy was sent for a hack, and, with the rocking-horse perched up by the side of the driver, and the doors tightly closed, nothing happened beyond what happens to ordinary boys who are carried about in hacks. Some little difficulty was experienced in getting him out on arrival home, for it appeared that he had formed the plan on the way of taking his horse into the coach and making a tour of the city by himself. He could not in any manner be satisfied of the impossibility of such an arrangement, and was at last taken out in a high state of indignation by the driver, who expressed a vehement wish to himself that “he had such a young one!” Nothing took place worthy of mention before bed-time, with the exception, perhaps, of the breaking of the carving-knife, and the ruin of Aunt Mary’s gold pen in an attempt to vaccinate his new acquisition.