"Guess it's all over but the shouting," said Neale, with satisfaction. "Down, Tom Jonah! Down, with you! Don't jump all over my best suit of clothes."
"And spare me your kisses, good old fellow!" begged Agnes. "We know just how glad you are to get out of jail. Who wouldn't be?"
"Je-ru-sa-lem!" ejaculated Sammy Pinkney; "who'd ha' thought of Tom Jonah getting pinched?"
Before the party got away from the pound, Ruth came racing down in the automobile. Returning from her first drive alone as a licensed chauffeur, she had heard of the family's migration to the pound and had come in haste to the rescue of Tom Jonah—and the remainder of the Corner House party.
"For goodness' sake! do get into the automobile and act as though we'd just come for a ride," exclaimed the oldest Corner House girl. "Did ever any one hear of such ridiculous things as happen to us?"
"You need not be so snippy," said Agnes, in some heat. "If Tom Jonah had actually been put into that awful gas chamber they tell about—"
"They don't do such things until it is positive that nobody will claim the dog—unless he really is afflicted with rabies," Ruth said. "I'm surprised at Aunt Sarah."
"You needn't be, young lady," said Miss Maltby. "You needn't be surprised at anything I may do. I have long known that I belonged to a family of crazy people, and now I guess I've proved myself as crazy as any of you."
However, they could laugh at it after a while. And they did not begrudge any trouble to save poor old Tom Jonah from inconvenience. While the children were away at school thereafter they were careful to put the old dog on a long leash in a shady corner of the yard.
After all, Tom Jonah had been a vagabond for a good part of his life, and old as he was sometimes the spirit of what Agnes called "the wanderlust" (she was just beginning German) came over him and he would go away to visit friends for two or three days at a time.