The blue dress and the tan coat were not Mother's at all! He had followed a strange woman!
He looked all around the car and couldn't see his own mother, nor a sign of Daddy. Though Sunny Boy did not know it, he had crossed the station platform and taken an uptown train. He was riding away from the hotel as fast as the noisy rumbling subway train could carry him.
"It's pretty crowded," said Sunny Boy to himself. "Maybe when some more folks get off at the next station, I can see Mother."
But though people got off at the next station and the next, there was no Mother.
Sunny Boy sat quietly. No one, looking at him, would have guessed that he was lost. When the crowd of people began to thin out, he followed a fat man with a big basket to the door and up the steps out into the street.
It was still light enough to see clearly, and Sunny Boy knew that he had never been in this part of New York. There were many small shops on either side of the street and moving picture places with great glaring signs already lit.
"Papers!" a boy on the corner was calling. "Papers!"
As Sunny watched him, several men stepped up and bought papers and ran down the subway steps.
Sunny felt in his pocket. There were two bright pennies there, slipped in by Mother, who always put money in the pocket of each new suit. Sunny jammed his hat more tightly on his yellow head and walked over to where the newsboy stood.
"Want a paper?" the boy grinned at him in a friendly way. "World? Well, didn't your father say? How much you got?"