“That dog began to howl soon after we went to bed. Mr. Pinkney sleeps so soundly that it did not annoy him. But I knew something was wrong when Buster howled so.
“Perhaps I’m superstitious. But we had an old dog that howled like that years ago when my grandmother died. She was ninety-six and had been bedridden for ten years, and the doctors said of course that she was likely to die almost any time. But that old Towser did howl the night grandma was taken.”
“So you think,” Agnes asked, without commenting upon Mrs. Pinkney’s possible trend toward superstition, “that Sammy has been gone practically all night?”
“I fear so. He must have waited for his father and me to go to bed. Then he slipped down the back stairs, tied Buster, and went out by the cellar door. All night long he’s been wandering somewhere. The poor, foolish boy!”
She took Agnes up to the boy’s room—a museum of all kinds of “useless truck,” as his mother said, but dear to the boyish heart.
“Oh, he’s gone sure enough,” she said, pointing to the bank which was supposed to be incapable of being opened until five dollars in dimes had been deposited within it. A screw-driver, however, had satisfied the burglarious intent of Sammy.
She pointed out the fact, too, that a certain extension bag that had figured before in her son’s runaway escapades was missing.
“The silly boy has taken his bathing suit and that cowboy play-suit his father bought him. I never did approve of that. Such things only give boys crazy notions about catching dogs and little girls with a rope, or shooting stray cats with a popgun.
“Of course, he has taken his gun with him and a bag of shot that he had to shoot in it. The gun shoots with a spring, you know. It doesn’t use real powder, of course. I have always believed such things are dangerous. But, you know, his father—
“Well, he wore his best shoes, and they will hurt him dreadfully, I am sure, if he walks far. And I can’t find that new cap I bought him only last week.”