mire to know?" demanded Aunt Sarah.

"'Cause it's stuck," gloomily explained Sammy. "I can't pull it one way,
nor yet the other. Oh, dear! I wish that cat would stop yowling!"

What he feared happened at that moment. His mother, hearing the
commotion in the street and seeing a crowd beginning to gather, ran out
of the house. She was always expecting something to happen to Sammy; and
if a crowd gathered anywhere near the house she surmised the most
dreadful peril for her son.

"Sammy! Sammy!" she shrieked. "What has become of Sammy?"

"Here I am, Ma," replied Sammy, with disgust.

"What's the matter with you? Come home this minute!" commanded Mrs.
Pinkney, who was a rather near-sighted woman, and having run out without
her glasses she did not spy her son in the window of the Corner House.

"I--I can't," confessed the boy, rather shaken.

At that moment Mrs. Pinkney saw the neighbors pointing upward, and
hearing them say: "See up there? In the basket! The poor thing!" she
naturally thought they referred to the peril of her young son.

"Oh, Sammy Pinkney! But you just wait till your father gets home
to-night!" she cried, trying to peer up at the wire. "I knew you'd get
into mischief with that thing Neale O'Neil strung up there. Whatever has
the boy tried to do? Walk tight-rope?"

"It's in the basket," somebody tried to explain to her.

That was too much for the excitable Mrs. Pinkney.

"He'll fall out of it! Of course he will. And break his precious neck!
Oh, get a blanket! Some of you run for the fire ladders! How will we get
him down?"

She sat down on the grass, threw her apron over her head, and refused to
look upward at the wire carrier in which Sandyface and her kittens were
suspended, and out of which she expected her reckless son to fall at any
moment.

It was at this exciting moment, and into the hubbub made by the
neighbors and Sandyface, that the automobile party whizzed around the
corner. Neale brought the car to a sudden stop and everybody screamed.

"That Sammy Pinkney!" gasped Tess, in despair. "I just _knew_ he'd get
into something!"

CHAPTER VIII

NEIGHBOR

What with Mrs. Pinkney almost in hysterics, Tom Jonah barking, the goat
blatting, Aunt Sarah scolding, and the neighbors in a general uproar, it
was scarcely possible for anybody to make himself heard.

Therefore Neale said nothing. He hopped out from behind the steering
wheel of the touring car and ran into the back premis