Tess repeated the full name, too. It did sound rather nice. The oftener you said it the better it sounded. And—yet—there was something a wee bit peculiar about it. But Tess was too kind-hearted to suggest anything wrong with the name, as long as Dot liked it so much. And she had found it all her very own self!
"I wonder what Sammy will say to that," murmured Dot placidly. "I guess he'll think it is a nice name, won't he?"
"Well, if he doesn't it won't make any difference," Tess said loftily.
Just at that time, however, (though quite unsuspected by the Corner House girls) Sammy Pinkney had his mind quite filled with other and more important matters.
Since his long illness in the spring Sammy had remained something of a stranger to his oldtime boy friends. Of course, as soon as he got into school again and associated with the boys of his own class once more, he would get back into the "gang" as he called it. He was not a boy to be gibed because he played with girls so much.
However, habit brought him to the side gate of the Corner House on this afternoon, whether the little girls were at home or not. He was so often in and out of the house that neither Mrs. MacCall nor Linda paid much attention to him; for although Sammy Pinkney was as "full of mischief as a chestnut is of meat" (to quote Mrs. MacCall) he never touched anything about the house that was not his, nor wandered into the rooms upstairs, save the one from the window of which the aerial tramway was strung to the window of his own bedroom "scatecornered" across Willow Street.
His aim was the window of the little girls' big playing and sleeping room now, for the wire basket chanced to be fastened at this end of the line. He had it in his mind to pull the basket over to his own house, fill it there with some sort of cargo, and draw it back and forth, amusing himself by imagining that he was loading a ship from the dock.
"Or, maybe," Sammy ruminated, "I'll have the old ship wrecked, and the lifesavers will put out the life buoy; and we'll bring the passengers ashore. Crickey! that'll be just the thing. I'll save 'em all from drownin'—that's what I'll do!"
Then he looked about in some anxiety for the wrecked passengers of the foundered steamship which he immediately imagined was cast on the reef just about as far from the Corner House as his own domicile stood.
"Got to have passengers!" cried Sammy. "Oh, crickey! the dolls would be just the thing. But I promised I wouldn't touch them. Aw, pshaw! a feller can't have much fun after all where there's a lot of girls around."