The boy pulled the basket cautiously to the extreme end of the wire—until the carrier bumped against the clapboards under his own bedroom window. He saw Sandyface raise her head again and glare around. Half asleep until this time she had not realized that she and her babies were being so marvelously transported from their own home to the cottage where Sammy resided.
"Crickey!" exclaimed the boy suddenly. "If mother comes out and sees 'em—or if that there bulldog Buster hears those cats meowing, there'll be trouble over there."
He started anxiously to draw the cats and the carrier back to the Corner House. In some way the line by which he drew the basket became fouled at the other end; or the pulleys on the wire became chocked. Sammy could not tell just what the trouble was, anyway.
But to his dismay the basket stuck midway of the line. High over the middle of Willow Street it stopped, and Sandyface was now standing up and telling the neighborhood just how scared she felt for her babies and herself.
"Lie down, cat!" the perturbed Sammy cried to her. "You'll fall overboard and drown—I mean, break your silly neck! S-st! Lie down!"
Tom Jonah, the old house dog, appeared suddenly below and began to bark. Billy Bumps came galloping around the house, shook his horns in disapproval, and "bla-ated" loudly.
Linda came to the kitchen door, beheld the cat in the basket high on the wire, and seemed to understand the cause of the trouble with uncanny certainty.
"That iss the Pinkney boy!" she cried. "If he was my brudder—"
Mrs. MacCall, called by the clatter, ran out. Aunt Sarah Maltby, even, appeared at the door, while Uncle Rufus limped up from the hen houses mildly demanding:
"What's done happen' to dem cats? Don't I hear dem prognosticatin' about, somewhar's?"