"You don't know if she has found _her_ sister yet?" asked Miss Pepperill, but more to herself than as though she expected a reply. "No! of course not."
Tess hurried to meet Dot after school. She found her sister at the girls' gate of the primary department, hugging the Alice-doll (of course, in a brand new cloak) and listening with wide-eyed interest to the small, impish, black-haired boy who was talking earnestly to her.
"And then I shall run away and sail the rollin' billers," he declared. "I hope they won't find old Pepperpot after I tie her to her chair--not--not from Friday afternoon till Monday mornin', when they open school again. That's what I hope. And by that time I can sail clean around the Cape of Good Hope to the Cannibal Islands, I guess."
"Oh-ee!" gasped Dot. "And suppose the cannibals eat you, Sammy Pinkney? What would your mother say?"
"She'd be sorry, I guess," said Sammy, darkly. "And so would my pop. But shucks!" he added quickly. "Pirates never get eat by cannibals. They're too smart."
"That's all you know about it, Sammy Pinkney!" said Tess, sternly, breaking in upon the boasting of the scapegrace, who dearly loved an audience. "We met a man this summer that knew all about pirates--or _said_ he did; didn't we, Dot?"
"Oh, yes. The clam-man," the smallest Corner House girl agreed. "And he had a wooden leg."
"Did he get it bein' a pirate?" demanded Sammy.
"He got it fighting pirates," Tess said firmly. "But the pirates got it worse. They got their legs mowed off."
"We-ell. Huh! I guess it would be fun to have a wooden leg, at that," the boy stoutly declared. "Anyway, a feller with a wooden leg wouldn't have growin' pains in it; and I have 'em awful when I go to bed nights, in _my_ legs."
As the little girls went on to the hospital, Dot suddenly felt some hesitancy about going, after all. "You know, Tess, they do such _awful_ things to folks in horsepistols!"
"For pity's sake! stop calling it _that_," begged Tess. "And they don't do awful things in hospitals."
"Yes they do; they take off folkses legs and arms and pull their teeth and----"
"They don't!" denied Tess, flatly. "Not in this hospital, anyway. Here, they cure sick ladies and little children that are lame and sick. Oh! it's a be-a-utiful place!"