Neale always walked to school with the little folks now, for Ruth was fearful that there might be other dogs loose afflicted with the terrible disease. A panic among little children is so easily started. She could trust Neale to have a watchful care over Dot and Tess.
Nothing so bad as that happened; but there did come a day when tragedy because of the mad-dog scare stalked near to the Corner House.
The dog-catchers were going about town netting all the stray dogs they could find. Foolish people who would not obey the law deserved to lose their pets. And if they wished to, if the dogs were pronounced perfectly healthy at the pound, the owners could appear and claim their pets by paying two dollars.
This last fact, however, was something the little Corner House girls and Sammy Pinkney knew nothing about. They had a horror of "the dog catchers." The collecting agents of the S. P. C. A. are bugbears in most communities. When the children saw the green van, with its screened door in the back, and heard the yapping of the excited dogs within, Dot and Tess stuffed their fingers in their ears and ran.
The children did not understand that stray dogs were likely to be bitten as those other dogs had been by one afflicted with the rabies; and that it was much more humane to catch the unmuzzled animals, that nobody cared for, and dispose of them painlessly, than to have them become diseased and a menace to the neighborhood.
To make the children understand that it was dangerous to play with strange dogs was a difficult matter. The little Corner House girls were prone to be friendly with passing animals.
All hungry and sore-eyed kittens appealed to Tess and Dot; the wag of a dog's tail was sufficient to interest them in its owner; each horse at the curb held a particular interest, too. They were trusting of nature, these little girls, and they trusted everybody and everything.
In coming home from school one afternoon Neale was in a hurry to do an errand, and he left the little folk at the corner, hurrying around to Con Murphy's on the back street, where he lived. Ruth was away from home and Agnes had not yet arrived at the Corner House.
The Willow Street block, however, seemed perfectly safe. Tess and Dot strolled along the block, their feet rustling the carpet of leaves that had now fallen from the trees. Sammy Pinkney was playing solitaire leapfrog over all posts and hydrants.
Just as they reached the corner of the Corner House yard Tom Jonah heard and saw them. He rose up, barking the glad tidings that his little friends were returning from school, and as he felt pretty well this day, he leaped the fence into the street and came cavorting toward them, laughing just as broadly as a dog could laugh.