Holly said, quietly: “There was a boy worked for Mrs. Hovey yesterday. He was awfully hungry and ragged. I saw him carrying in wood from her woodpile. And he just staggered, he was so small and weak. And his hair looked so funny——”
“What was the matter with his hair?” asked her sister.
“It was red. Brick red. I never saw such red hair before.”
“Oh!” cried Tess. “Did he have sure enough red hair?” Then she turned to Dot. “Do you s’pose it could be Tommy Rooney, Dot?”
“Who’s Tommy Rooney?” asked Mrs. Adams.
The Corner House girls told them all about Tommy, and how he had run away from home, and why they half believed he had come here to Milton.
“To shoot Indians!” exclaimed Mrs. Adams. “Whoever heard of such a crazy notion? Mercy! boys get worse and worse, every day.”
Perhaps it was because of this conversation that Tess and Dot at once thought of Tommy on the way home that evening after the party, when they saw a man and a dog chasing a small boy across Willow Street near the old Corner House.
“That’s Sammy Pinkney’s bulldog,” declared Tess, in fright. “And it’s Sammy’s father, too.”
The boy crawled over the high fence at the back of their garden and got through the hedge. When the girls caught up with the man, Tess asked: