Mother continued to sew steadily. Suddenly a mischievous idea popped into Sunny’s mind. He put down Curly and ran to his own room. When he came out he went out of the house the back way, and slammed the screen-door without speaking to Harriet, who was busy ironing. You know, don’t you, how it does relieve your feelings to slam doors? Well, Sunny Boy, who was really as bad as he could be that morning, felt better directly. He even tried to whistle as he went down the street.
He knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to town and ride on the merry-go-round and have an ice-cream cone. They had been in Nestle Cove over three weeks, and he had been to town only that once with Harriet.
“All the other children go,” Sunny Boy said to himself, hailing the rattling old jitney as it came past the corner. He had taken good care to walk two blocks down the road so that no one from his house could see him.
He had a pocketful of pennies that jingled merrily. Daddy on his last visit had added to the store in the pasteboard box that stood on Sunny’s bureau, and Mother and the aunties often dropped pennies in, too. Sunny Boy was sure he had enough money to go to the city with, had he wished to go.
“Goin’ far?” the jitney driver asked. There were only three other passengers in his bus.
“To town,” Sunny assured him cheerfully. “Is the merry-go-round running yet?”
“Well, ’tis, if it didn’t burn down last night,” said the jitney driver. “I was over that way ’bout ten o’clock, and she sure was crowded.”
The jitney bus went only as far as the post-office, and Sunny paid his fare there, counting out the five pennies slowly, and jumped down. He remembered where the merry-go-round was, and if he had not, the music would have led him to it.
“What are you going on?” asked a boy slightly older than Sunny, as they stood watching the whirling figures and waiting for the thing to stop. “I’ve been on everything ’cept the tigers, an’ this time I’m going on one of ’em.”
“I’d like a zebra,” announced Sunny Boy shyly. “Or maybe a horse—they go up and down, don’t they?”