"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?" "Sammy Pinkney!" cried Mrs. MacCall, the first to spy the boy at the window of the little girls' play-room, "what are you doing up there?" "He's got the cat and the kittens in that basket. Did you ever?" exclaimed Aunt Sarah. "You naughty boy!" commanded Mrs. MacCall, "you pull that thing right back here and let poor Sandyface out." "I can't, Mrs. MacCall," woefully declared the boy who wanted to be a pirate. "Then pull it over to your house," said the housekeeper. "I--I can't do that either," confessed Sammy. "Why not, I should admire 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.