“My!” murmured Dot, “it must cost lots more to run away and be pirates now than it used to.”
“Everything is much higher,” agreed Tess.
CHAPTER V—SAMMY OCCASIONS MUCH EXCITEMENT
“I do hope and pray,” Aunt Sarah Maltby declared, “that Mrs. Pinkney won’t go quite distracted about that boy. Boys make so much trouble usually that a body would near about believe that it must be an occasion for giving thanks to get rid of one like Sammy Pinkney.”
This was said of course after Sammy’s mother had gone home in tears—and Agnes had accompanied her to give such comfort as she might. The whole neighborhood was roused about the missing Sammy. All agreed that the boy never was of so much importance as when he was missing.
“I do hope and pray that the little rascal will turn up soon,” continued Aunt Sarah, “for Mrs. Pinkney’s sake.”
“I wonder,” murmured Dot to Tess, “why it is Aunt Sarah always says she ‘hopes and prays’? Wouldn’t just praying be enough? You’re sure to get what you pray for, aren’t you?”
“But what is the use of praying if you don’t hope?” demanded Tess, the hair-splitting theologian. “They must go together, Dot. I should think you’d see that.”
Mrs. Pinkney had lost hope of finding Sammy, however, right at the start. She knew him of course of old. He had been running away ever since he could toddle out of the gate; but she and Mr. Pinkney tried to convince themselves that each time would be the last—that he was “cured.”
For almost always Sammy’s runaway escapades ended disastrously for him and covered him with ridicule. Particularly ignominious was the result of his recent attempt, which is narrated in the volume immediately preceding this, to accompany the Corner House Girls on their canal-boat cruise, when he appeared as a stowaway aboard the boat in the company of Billy Bumps, the goat.