“Wait a minute,” said Neale, as Sammy started away in anger. “Maybe all those beet plants you pulled up aren’t wilted. We can save some of them. Beets grow very well when they are transplanted—especially if the ground is wet enough and the sun isn’t too hot. It looks like rain for to-night, anyway.”
“Aw—I—”
“Come on! We’ll get some water and stick out what we can save. I’ll help you and the girls needn’t know you were such a dummy.”
“Dummy, yourself!” snarled the tired and over-wrought boy. “I’ll never weed another beet again—no, I won’t!”
Sammy made a bee-line out of the garden and over the fence into Willow Street, leaving Neale fairly shaking with laughter, yet fully realizing how dreadfully cut-up Sammy must feel.
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune seem much greater to the mind of a youngster like Sammy Pinkney than to an adult person. The ridicule which he knew he must suffer because of his mistake about the beet bed, seemed something that he really could not bear. Besides, he had worked all the afternoon for nothing (as he presumed) and only the satisfaction of having earned fifty cents would have counteracted the ache in his muscles.
Harried by his disappointment, Sammy was met by his mother in a stern mood, her first question being:
“Where have you been wasting your time ever since dinner, Sammy Pinkney? I never did see such a lazy boy!”
It was true that he had wasted his time. But his sore muscles cried out against the charge that he was lazy.
He could not explain, however, without revealing his shame. To be ridiculed was the greatest punishment Sammy Pinkney knew.