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BOY LIFE
STORIES AND READINGS SELECTED FROM THE WORKS OF
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
AND ARRANGED FOR SUPPLEMENTARY
READING IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS BY
PERCIVAL CHUBB
DIRECTOR OF ENGLISH IN THE
ETHICAL CULTURE SCHOOL, NEW YORK
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMIX
HARPER'S MODERN SERIES
OF SUPPLEMENTARY READERS FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
_Each, Illustrated, 16mo, 50 Cents School._
BOY LIFE
Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS,
and Arranged by PERCIVAL CHUBB, Director of English in the Ethical
Culture School, New York.
"The literary culture which we are trying to give our boys and
girls is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not
sufficiently national and American....
"Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more
distinctively American savor than that of William Dean
Howells.... The juvenile books of Mr. Howells' contain some of
the very best pages ever written for the enjoyment of young
people."--PERCIVAL CHUBB.
(_Others in Preparation._)
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published September, 1909.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I. ADVENTURES IN A BOY'S TOWN
HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS 3
THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN 13
JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE 23
II. LIFE IN A BOY'S TOWN
THE TOWN 41
EARLIEST MEMORIES 45
HOME LIFE 47
THE RIVER 51
SWIMMING 55
SKATING 61
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 64
GIRLS 68
MOTHERS 69
A BROTHER 73
A FRIEND 79
III. GAMES AND PASTIMES
MARBLES 89
RACES 91
A MEAN TRICK 93
TOPS 96
KITES 98
THE BUTLER GUARDS 103
PETS 108
INDIANS 124
GUNS 129
NUTTING 138
THE FIRE-ENGINES 145
IV. GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD
THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS 151
PASSING SHOWS 163
THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN 168
THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS 171
V. THE LAST OF A BOY'S TOWN 183
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
KITE-TIME _Frontispiece_
HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE
VERY NEXT MORNING 5
THE FIRST LOCK 43
THE BUTLER GUARDS 105
ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE 127
NUTTING 141
INTRODUCTION
There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we are
trying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondary
schools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not
sufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality and
actuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so little
of it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated too
exclusively in the child's mind with things dead and gone--with the
Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere,
the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively
recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of
the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the
Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies
do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which--if
he reads at all--he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, the
sketch, and the popular essay of the magazines and newspapers; the new
novel, or the plays which he may see at the theatre. He has not been
interested in the writers of his own time, and has never been put in the
way of the best contemporary fiction. Hence the ineffectualness and
wastefulness of much of our school work: it does not lead forward into
the life of to-day, nor help the young to judge intelligently of the
popular books which later on will compete for their favor.
To be sure, not a little of the material used in our elementary schools
is drawn from Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, from Irving and
Hawthorne; but because it is often studied in a so-called thorough and,
therefore, very deadly way--slowly and laboriously for drill, rather
than briskly for pleasure--there is comparatively little of it read, and
almost no sense gained of its being part of a national literature. In
the high school, owing to the unfortunate domination of the college
entrance requirements, the situation is not much better. Our students
leave with a scant and hurried glimpse--if any glimpse at all--of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, or of Lowell, Lanier, and Poe; with no
intimate view of Hawthorne, our great classic; none at all of Parkman
and Fiske, our historians; or of writers like Howells, James, and Cable,
or Wilkins, Jewett, and Deland, and a worthy company of story-tellers.
We may well be on our guard against a vaunting nationalism. It retards
our culture. There should be no confusion of the second-rate values of
most of our American products with the supreme values of the greatest
British classics. We may work, of course, toward an ultimate
appreciation of these greatest things. We fail, however, in securing
such appreciation because we have failed to enlist those forms of
interest which vitalize and stimulate literary studies--above all, the
patriotic or national interest. Concord and Cambridge should be dearer,
as they are nearer, to the young American than even Stratford and
Abbotsford; Hawthorne should be as familiar as Goldsmith; and Emerson,
as Addison or Burke. Ordinarily it is not so; and we suffer the
consequences in the failure of our youth to grasp the spiritual ideals
and the distinctively American democratic spirit which find expression
in the greatest work of our literary masters, Emerson and Whitman,
Lowell and Lanier. Our culture and our nationalism both suffer thereby.
Our literature suffers also, because we have not an instructed and
interested public to encourage excellence.
Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more
distinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells; and it
is to make his delightful writings more widely known and more easily
accessible that this volume of selections from his books for the young
has been prepared as a reading-book for the elementary school. These
juvenile books of Mr. Howells contain some of the very best pages ever
written for the enjoyment of young people. His two books for boys--_A
Boy's Town_ and _The Flight of Pony Baker_--rank with such favorites as
_Tom Sawyer_ and _The Story of a Bad Boy_.
These should be introductory to the best of Mr. Howells' novels and
essays in the high school; for Mr. Howells, it need scarcely be said, is
one of our few masters of style: his style is as individual and
distinguished as it is felicitous and delicate. More important still,
from the educational point of view, he is one of our most modern
writers: the spiritual issues and social problems of our age, which our
older high-school pupils are anxious to deal with, are alive in his
books. Our young people should know his _Rise of Silas Lapham_ and _A
Hazard of New Fortunes_, as well as his social and literary criticism.
As stimulating and alluring a volume of selections may be made for
high-school students as this volume will be, we venture to predict, for
the younger boys and girls of the elementary school.
In this little book of readings we have made, we believe, an entirely
legitimate and desirable use of the books named above. _A Boy's Town_
is a series of detachable pictures and episodes into which the boy--or
the healthy girl who loves boys' books--may dip, as the selections here
given will, we believe, tempt him to do. The same is true of _The Flight
of Pony Baker_. The volume is for class-room enjoyment; for happy hours
of profitable reading--profitable, because happy. Much of it should be
read aloud rather than silently, and dramatic justice be done to the
scenes and conversations which have dramatic quality.
PERCIVAL CHUBB.
I
ADVENTURES IN A BOY'S TOWN
HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS
Just before the circus came, about the end of July, something happened
that made Pony mean to run off more than anything that ever was. His
father and mother were coming home from a walk, in the evening; it was
so hot nobody could stay in the house, and just as they were coming to
the front steps Pony stole up behind them and tossed a snowball which he
had got out of the garden at his mother, just for fun. The flower struck
her very softly on her hair, for she had no bonnet on, and she gave a
jump and a hollo that made Pony laugh; and then she caught him by the
arm and boxed his ears.
"Oh, my goodness! It was you, was it, you good-for-nothing boy? I
thought it was a bat!" she said, and she broke out crying and ran into
the house, and would not mind his father, who was calling after her,
"Lucy, Lucy, my dear child!"
Pony was crying, too, for he did not intend to frighten his mother, and
when she took his fun as if he had done something wicked he did not know
what to think. He stole off to bed, and he lay there crying in the dark
and expecting that she would come to him, as she always did, to have him
say that he was sorry when he had been wicked, or to tell him that she
was sorry when she thought she had not been quite fair with him. But she
did not come, and after a good while his father came and said: "Are you
awake, Pony? I am sorry your mother misunderstood your fun. But you
mustn't mind it, dear boy. She's not well, and she's very nervous."
"I don't care!" Pony sobbed out. "She won't have a chance to touch me
again!" For he had made up his mind to run off with the circus which was
coming the next Tuesday.
He turned his face away, sobbing, and his father, after standing by his
bed a moment, went away without saying anything but "Don't forget your
prayers, Pony. You'll feel differently in the morning, I hope."
Pony fell asleep thinking how he would come back to the Boy's Town with
the circus when he was grown up, and when he came out in the ring riding
three horses bareback he would see his father and mother and sisters in
one of the lower seats. They would not know him, but he would know them,
and he would send for them to come to the dressing-room, and would be
very good to them, all but his mother; he would be very cold and stiff
with her, though he would know that she was prouder of him than all the
rest put together, and she would go away almost crying.
[Illustration: HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE VERY NEXT
MORNING]
He began being cold and stiff with her the very next morning, although
she was better than ever to him, and gave him waffles for breakfast with
unsalted butter, and tried to pet him up. That whole day she kept trying
to do things for him, but he would scarcely speak to her; and at night
she came to him and said, "What makes you act so strangely, Pony? Are
you offended with your mother?"
"Yes, I am!" said Pony, haughtily, and he twitched away from where she
was sitting on the side of his bed, leaning over him.
"On account of last night, Pony?" she asked, softly.
"I reckon you know well enough," said Pony, and he tried to be disgusted
with her for being such a hypocrite, but he had to set his teeth hard,
hard, or he would have broken down crying.
"If it's for that, you mustn't, Pony dear. You don't know how you
frightened me. When your snowball hit me, I felt sure it was a bat, and
I'm so afraid of bats, you know. I didn't mean to hurt my poor boy's
feelings so, and you mustn't mind it any more, Pony."
She stooped down and kissed him on the forehead, but he did not move or
say anything; only, after that he felt more forgiving toward his mother.
He made up his mind to be good to her along with the rest when he came
back with the circus. But still he meant to run off with the circus. He
did not see how he could do anything else, for he had told all the boys
that day that he was going to do it; and when they just laughed, and
said, "Oh yes. Think you can fool your grandmother! It'll be like
running off with the Indians," Pony wagged his head, and said they would
see whether it would or not, and offered to bet them what they dared.
The morning of the circus day all the fellows went out to the
corporation line to meet the circus procession. There were ladies and
knights, the first thing, riding on spotted horses; and then a
band-chariot, all made up of swans and dragons. There were about twenty
baggage-wagons; but before you got to them there was the greatest thing
of all. It was a chariot drawn by twelve Shetland ponies, and it was
shaped like a big shell, and around in the bottom of the shell there
were little circus actors, boys and girls, dressed in their circus
clothes, and they all looked exactly like fairies. They scarce seemed
to see the fellows, as they ran alongside of their chariot, but Hen
Billard and Archy Hawkins, who were always cutting up, got close enough
to throw some peanuts to the circus boys, and some of the little circus
girls laughed, and the driver looked around and cracked his whip at the
fellows, and they all had to get out of the way then.
Jim Leonard said that the circus boys and girls were all stolen, and
nobody was allowed to come close to them for fear they would try to send
word to their friends. Some of the fellows did not believe it, and
wanted to know how he knew it; and he said he read it in a paper; after
that nobody could deny it. But he said that if you went with the circus
men of your own free will they would treat you first-rate; only they
would give you burnt brandy to keep you little; nothing else but burnt
brandy would do it, but that would do it, sure.
Pony was scared at first when he heard that most of the circus fellows
were stolen, but he thought if he went of his own accord he would be all
right. Still, he did not feel so much like running off with the circus
as he did before the circus came. He asked Jim Leonard whether the
circus men made all the children drink burnt brandy; and Archy Hawkins
and Hen Billard heard him ask, and began to mock him. They took him up
between them, one by his arms and the other by the legs, and ran along
with him, and kept saying, "Does it want to be a great big circus actor?
Then it shall, so it shall," and, "We'll tell the circus men to be very
careful of you, Pony dear!" till Pony wriggled himself loose and began
to stone them.
After that they had to let him alone, for when a fellow began to stone
you in the Boy's Town you had to let him alone, unless you were going to
whip him, and the fellows only wanted to have a little fun with Pony.
But what they did made him all the more resolved to run away with the
circus, just to show them.
He helped to carry water for the circus men's horses, along with the
boys who earned their admission that way. He had no need to do it,
because his father was going to take him in, anyway; but Jim Leonard
said it was the only way to get acquainted with the circus men. Still,
Pony was afraid to speak to them, and he would not have said a word to
any of them if it had not been for one of them speaking to him first,
when he saw him come lugging a great pail of water, and bending far over
on the right to balance it.
"That's right," the circus man said to Pony. "If you ever fell into that
bucket you'd drown, sure."
He was a big fellow, with funny eyes, and he had a white bulldog at his
heels; and all the fellows said he was the one who guarded the outside
of the tent when the circus began, and kept the boys from hooking in
under the curtain.
Even then Pony would not have had the courage to say anything, but Jim
Leonard was just behind him with another bucket of water, and he spoke
up for him. "He wants to go with the circus."
They both set down their buckets, and Pony felt himself turning pale
when the circus man came toward them. "Wants to go with the circus,
heigh? Let's have a look at you." He took Pony by the shoulders and
turned him slowly round, and looked at his nice clothes, and took him by
the chin. "Orphan?" he asked.
Pony did not know what to say, but Jim Leonard nodded; perhaps he did
not know what to say, either; but Pony felt as if they had both told a
lie.
"Parents living?" The circus man looked at Pony, and Pony had to say
that they were.
He gasped out, "Yes," so that you could scarcely hear him, and the
circus man said:
"Well, that's right. When we take an orphan, we want to have his parents
living, so that we can go and ask them what sort of a boy he is."
He looked at Pony in such a friendly, smiling way that Pony took courage
to ask him whether they would want him to drink burnt brandy.
"What for?"
"To keep me little."
"Oh, I see." The circus man took off his hat and rubbed his forehead
with a silk handkerchief, which he threw into the top of his hat before
he put it on again. "No, I don't know as we will. We're rather short of
giants just now. How would you like to drink a glass of elephant milk
every morning and grow into an eight-footer?"
Pony said he didn't know whether he would like to be quite so big; and
then the circus man said perhaps he would rather go for an India-rubber
man; that was what they called the contortionists in those days.
"Let's feel of you again." The circus man took hold of Pony and felt his
joints. "You're put together pretty tight; but I reckon we could make
you do if you'd let us take you apart with a screw-driver and limber up
the pieces with rattlesnake oil. Wouldn't like it, heigh? Well, let me
see!" The circus man thought a moment, and then he said: "How would
double-somersaults on four horses bareback do?"
Pony said that would do, and then the circus man said: "Well, then,
we've just hit it, because our double-somersault, four-horse bareback
is just going to leave us, and we want a new one right away. Now,
there's more than one way of joining a circus, but the best way is to
wait on your front steps with your things all packed up, and the
procession comes along at about one o'clock in the morning and picks you
up. Which'd you rather do?"
Pony pushed his toe into the turf, as he always did when he was ashamed,
but he made out to say he would rather wait out on the front steps.
"Well, then, that's all settled," said the circus man. "We'll be along,"
and he was going away with his dog, but Tim Leonard called after him:
"You hain't asked him whereabouts he lives?"
The circus man kept on, and he said, without looking around, "Oh, that's
all right. We've got somebody that looks after that."
"It's the magician," Jim Leonard whispered to Pony, and they walked
away.
THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN
A crowd of the fellows had been waiting to know what the boys had been
talking about to the circus man, but Jim Leonard said, "Don't you tell,
Pony Baker!" and he started to run, and that made Pony run, too, and
they both ran till they got away from the fellows.
"You have got to keep it a secret; for if a lot of fellows find it out
the constable'll get to know it, and he'll be watching out around the
corner of your house, and when the procession comes along and he sees
you're really going he'll take you up, and keep you in jail till your
father comes and bails you out. Now, you mind!"
Pony said, "Oh, I won't tell anybody," and when Jim Leonard said that if
a circus man was to feel _him_ over, that way, and act so kind of
pleasant and friendly, he would be too proud to speak to anybody, Pony
confessed that he knew it was a great thing all the time.
"The way'll be," said Jim Leonard, "to keep in with him, and he'll keep
the others from picking on you; they'll be afraid to, on account of his
dog. You'll see, he'll be the one to come for you to-night; and if the
constable is there the dog won't let him touch you. I never thought of
that."
Perhaps on account of thinking of it now Jim Leonard felt free to tell
the other fellows how Pony was going to run off, for when a crowd of
them came along he told them. They said it was splendid, and they said
that if they could make their mothers let them, or if they could get out
of the house without their mothers knowing it, they were going to sit
up with Pony and watch out for the procession, and bid him good-bye.
At dinner-time he found out that his father was going to take him and
all his sisters to the circus, and his father and mother were so nice to
him, asking him about the procession and everything, that his heart
ached at the thought of running away from home and leaving them. But now
he had to do it; the circus man was coming for him, and he could not
back out; he did not know what would happen if he did. It seemed to him
as if his mother had done everything she could to make it harder for
him. She had stewed chicken for dinner, with plenty of gravy, and hot
biscuits to sop in, and peach preserves afterward; and she kept helping
him to more, because she said boys that followed the circus around got
dreadfully hungry. The eating seemed to keep his heart down; it was
trying to get into his throat all the time; and he knew that she was
being good to him, but if he had not known it he would have believed his
mother was just doing it to mock him.
Pony had to go to the circus with his father and sisters, and to get on
his shoes and a clean collar. But a crowd of the fellows were there at
the tent door to watch out whether the circus man would say anything to
him when he went in; and Jim Leonard rubbed against him, when the man
passed with his dog and did not even look at Pony, and said: "He's just
pretending. He don't want your father to know. He'll be round for you,
sure. I saw him kind of smile to one of the other circus men."
It was a splendid circus, and there were more things than Pony ever saw
in a circus before. But instead of hating to have it over, it seemed to
him that it would never come to an end. He kept thinking and thinking,
and wondering whether he would like to be a circus actor; and when the
one came out who rode four horses bareback and stood on his head on the
last horse, and drove with the reins in his teeth, Pony thought that he
never could learn to do it; and if he could not learn he did not know
what the circus men would say to him. It seemed to him that it was very
strange he had not told that circus man that he didn't know whether he
could do it or not; but he had not, and now it was too late.
A boy came around calling lemonade, and Pony's father bought some for
each of the children, but Pony could hardly taste his.
"What is the matter with you, Pony? Are you sick?" his father asked.
"No. I don't care for any; that's all. I'm well," said Pony; but he felt
very miserable.
After supper Jim Leonard came round and went up to Pony's room with him
to help him pack, and he was so gay about it and said he only wished
_he_ was going, that Pony cheered up a little. Jim had brought a large
square of checked gingham that he said he did not believe his mother
would ever want, and that he would tell her he had taken if she asked
for it. He said it would be the very thing for Pony to carry his clothes
in, for it was light and strong and would hold a lot. He helped Pony to
choose his things out of his bureau drawers: a pair of stockings and a
pair of white pantaloons and a blue roundabout, and a collar, and two
handkerchiefs. That was all he said Pony would need, because he would
have his circus clothes right away, and there was no use taking things
that he would never wear.
Jim did these up in the square of gingham, and he tied it across
cater-cornered twice, in double knots, and showed Pony how he could put
his hand through and carry it just as easy. He hid it under the bed for
him, and he told Pony that if he was in Pony's place he should go to bed
right away or pretty soon, so that nobody would think anything, and
maybe he could get some sleep before he got up and went down to wait on
the front steps for the circus to come along. He promised to be there
with the other boys and keep them from fooling or making a noise, or
doing anything to wake his father up, or make the constable come. "You
see, Pony," he said, "if you can run off this year, and come back with
the circus next year, then a whole lot of fellows can run off. Don't you
see that?"
Pony said he saw that, but he said he wished some of the other fellows
were going now, because he did not know any of the circus boys and he
was afraid he might feel kind of lonesome. But Jim Leonard said he would
soon get acquainted, and, anyway, a year would go before he knew it, and
then if the other fellows could get off he would have plenty of company.
As soon as Jim Leonard was gone Pony undressed and got into bed. He was
not sleepy, but he thought maybe it would be just as well to rest a
little while before the circus procession came along for him; and,
anyway, he could not bear to go down-stairs and be with the family when
he was going to leave them so soon, and not come back for a whole year.
After a good while, or about the time he usually came in from playing,
he heard his mother saying: "Where in the world is Pony? Has he come in
yet? Have you seen him, girls? Pony! Pony!" she called.
But somehow Pony could not get his voice up out of his throat; he wanted
to answer her, but he could not speak. He heard her say, "Go out to the
front steps, girls, and see if you can see him," and then he heard her
coming up the stairs; and she came into his room, and when she saw him
lying there in bed, she said: "Why, I believe in my heart the child's
asleep! Pony! Are you awake?"
Pony made out to say no, and his mother said: "My! what a fright you
gave me! Why didn't you answer me? Are you sick, Pony? Your father said
you didn't seem well at the circus; and you didn't eat any supper,
hardly."
Pony said he was first-rate, but he spoke very low, and his mother came
up and sat down on the side of his bed.
"What is the matter, child?" She bent over and felt his forehead. "No,
you haven't got a bit of fever," she said, and she kissed him, and began
to tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one of
his hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. "But you've had a long,
tiresome day, and that's why you've gone to bed, I suppose. But if you
feel the least sick, Pony, I'll send for the doctor."
Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he felt
as if he never wanted to get up again.
His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close down
to his, and said very low: "Pony dear, you don't feel hard toward your
mother for what she did the other night?"
He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and he
said: "Oh no," and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; and
she told him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again;
but she was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing.
When he quieted down, she said: "Now say your prayers, Pony, 'Our
Father,'" and she said, "Our Father" all through with him, and after
that, "Now I lay me," just as when he was a very little fellow. After
they had finished she stooped over and kissed him again, and when he
turned his face into his pillow she kept smoothing his hair with her
hand for about a minute. Then she went away.
Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. His
father came in from uptown at last, and asked: "Has Pony come in?"
And his mother said; "Yes, he's up in bed. I wouldn't disturb him,
Henry. He's asleep by this time."
His father said: "I don't know what to make of the boy. If he keeps on
acting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning."
Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in the
morning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down to
his father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it did
not seem as if he could.
By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thought
it was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew that
the procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on his
things as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve to
it, somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers to
keep it on. He got his bundle and stole down to the front door without
seeming to touch his feet to anything, and when he got out on the front
steps he saw the circus magician coming along. By that time the music
had stopped and Pony could not see any procession. The magician had on a
tall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was so
wide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretched
them out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand in
one hand, like a blind man.
He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice, "It's all glory; it's
all glory," and the sound of those words froze Pony's blood. He tried to
get back into the house again, so that the magician should not find him,
but when he felt for the door-knob there was no door there anywhere;
nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried to
shrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw his
wide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and the
doctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:
"He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled," and he got out his
lancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: "Pony, Pony! What's the
matter? Have you got the nightmare?" and he woke up, and found it was
just morning.
The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to think
that by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, that
he hardly knew what to do.
He was not very well for two or three days afterward, and his mother let
him stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick or
not. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he had
been going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened to
think of it plagued him a little and asked how he liked being a circus
actor.
Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician got
scared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men that
they would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reason
why they didn't take him. Archy Hawkins said: "How long did you have to
wait on the front steps, Pony dear?" But after that he was pretty good
to him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretend
that Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see.
Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on the
front steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed all
of it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried to
help him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he had
overslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way he
said, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and how
much was not.
JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE
Jim Leonard's stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on a
rise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard's log-cabin. The boys called
it Jim Leonard's log-cabin, but it was really his mother's, and the
stable was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable began
the logs stopped, and it was weather-boarded the rest of the way, and
the roof was shingled.
Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was loose
clapboards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs in
the early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, in
the country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, and
you had to take Jim Leonard's word for it if you wanted to believe it.
The little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterward it was a
good thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he had
his hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not have
cared if it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his mother
had whipped him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it.
He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to land
when they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would have
been just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right across
the river to Delorac's Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely he
could, but Hen Billard said:
"Well, why didn't you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?"
Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them thought he
could have done it if he could have got into the eddy that there was
over by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he could have
camped out and lived on fish till the river fell.
It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which
always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember.
The country above the Boy's Town was under water for miles and miles.
The river-bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all planted
over again when the water went down. The freshet tore away pieces of
orchard, and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with logs and
fence-rails and chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and horses.
There was a dog chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling awfully;
the boys would have given anything if they could have saved him, but the
yellow river whirled him out of sight behind the middle pier of the
bridge, which everybody was watching from the bank, expecting it to go
any minute. The water was up within four or five feet of the bridge, and
the boys believed that if a good big log had come along and hit it, the
bridge would have been knocked loose from its piers and carried down the
river.
Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys all ran to watch it
as soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper.
After supper some of their mothers let them come back and stay till
bedtime, if they would promise to keep a full yard back from the edge of
the bank. They could not be sure just how much a yard was, and they
nearly all sat down on the edge and let their legs hang over.
Jim Leonard was there, holloing and running up and down the bank, and
showing the other boys things away out in the river that nobody else
could see; he said he saw a man out there. He had not been to supper,
and he had not been to school all day, which might have been the reason
why he would rather stay with the men and watch the bridge than go home
to supper; his mother would have been waiting for him with a sucker from
the pear-tree. He told the boys that while they were gone he went out
with one of the men on the bridge as far as the middle pier, and it
shook like a leaf; he showed with his hand how it shook.
Jim Leonard was a fellow who believed he did all kinds of things that he
would like to have done; and the big boys just laughed. That made Jim
Leonard mad, and he said that as soon as the bridge began to go, he was
going to run out on it and go with it; and then they would see whether
he was a liar or not! They mocked him and danced round him till he
cried. But Pony Baker, who had come with his father, believed that Jim
Leonard would really have done it; and at any rate, he felt sorry for
him when Jim cried.
He stayed later than any of the little fellows, because his father was
with him, and even all the big boys had gone home except Hen Billard,
when Pony left Jim Leonard on the bank and stumbled sleepily away, with
his hand in his father's.
When Pony was gone, Hen Billard said: "Well, going to stay all night,
Jim?"
And Jim Leonard answered back, as cross as could be, "Yes, I am!" And he
said the men who were sitting up to watch the bridge were going to give
him some of their coffee, and that would keep him awake. But perhaps he
thought this because he wanted some coffee so badly. He was awfully
hungry, for he had not had anything since breakfast, except a piece of
bread-and-butter that he got Pony Baker to bring him in his pocket when
he came down from school at noontime.
Hen Billard said, "Well, I suppose I won't see you any more, Jim;
good-bye," and went away laughing; and after a while one of the men saw
Jim Leonard hanging about, and asked him what he wanted there at that
time of night; and Jim could not say he wanted coffee, and so there was
nothing for him to do but go. There was nowhere for him to go but home,
and he sneaked off in the dark.
When he came in sight of the cabin he could not tell whether he would
rather have his mother waiting for him with a whipping and some supper,
or get to bed somehow with neither. He climbed softly over the back
fence and crept up to the back door, but it was fast; then he crept
round to the front door, and that was fast, too. There was no light in
the house, and it was perfectly still.
All of a sudden it struck him that he could sleep in the stable-loft,
and he thought what a fool he was not to have thought of it before. The
notion brightened him up so that he got the gourd that hung beside the
well-curb and took it out to the stable with him; for now he remembered
that the cow would be there, unless she was in somebody's garden-patch
or cornfield.
He noticed as he walked down toward the stable that the freshet had come
up over the flat, and just before the door he had to wade. But he was in
his bare feet, and he did not care; if he thought anything, he thought
that his mother would not come out to milk till the water went down, and
he would be safe till then from the whipping he must take, sooner or
later, for playing hooky.
Sure enough, the old cow was in the stable, and she gave Jim Leonard a
snort of welcome and then lowed anxiously. He fumbled through the dark
to her side, and began to milk her. She had been milked only a few hours
before, and so he got only a gourdful from her. But it was all
strippings, and rich as cream, and it was smoking warm. It seemed to Jim
Leonard that it went down to his very toes when he poured it into his
throat, and it made him feel so good that he did not know what to do.
There really was not anything for him to do but to climb up into the
loft by the ladder in the corner of the stable, and lie down on the old
last year's fodder. The rich, warm milk made Jim Leonard awfully sleepy,
and he dropped off almost as soon as his head touched the cornstalks.
The last thing he remembered was the hoarse roar of the freshet outside,
and that was a lulling music in his ears.
The next thing he knew, and he hardly knew that, was a soft, jolting,
sinking motion, first to one side and then to the other; then he seemed
to be going down, down, straight down, and then to be drifting off into
space. He rubbed his eyes and found it was full daylight, although it
was the daylight of early morning; and while he lay looking out of the
stable-loft window and trying to make out what it all meant, he felt a
wash of cold water along his back, and his bed of fodder melted away
under him and around him, and some loose planks of the loft floor swam
weltering out of the window. Then he knew what had happened. The flood
had stolen up while he slept, and sapped the walls of the stable; the
logs had given way, one after another, and had let him down, with the
roof, into the water.
He got to his feet as well as he could, and floundered over the rising
and falling boards to the window in the floating gable. One look outside
showed him his mother's log-cabin safe on its rise of ground, and at the
corner the old cow, that must have escaped through the stable door he
had left open, and passed the night among the cabbages. She seemed to
catch sight of Jim Leonard when he put his head out, and she lowed to
him.
Jim Leonard did not stop to make any answer. He clambered out of the
window and up onto the ridge of the roof, and there, in the company of a
large gray rat, he set out on the strangest voyage a boy ever made. In a
few moments the current swept him out into the middle of the river, and
he was sailing down between his native shore on one side and Delorac's
Island on the other.
All round him seethed and swirled the yellow flood in eddies and
ripples, where drift of all sorts danced and raced. His vessel, such as
it was, seemed seaworthy enough. It held securely together, fitting like
a low, wide cup over the water, and perhaps finding some buoyancy from
the air imprisoned in it above the window. But Jim Leonard was not
satisfied, and so far from being proud of his adventure, he was
frightened worse even than the rat which shared it. As soon as he could
get his voice, he began to shout for help to the houses on the empty
shores, which seemed to fly backward on both sides while he lay still on
the gulf that swashed around him, and tried to drown his voice before it
swallowed him up. At the same time the bridge, which had looked so far
off when he first saw it, was rushing swiftly toward him, and getting
nearer and nearer.
He wondered what had become of all the people and all the boys. He
thought that if he were safe there on shore he should not be sleeping in
bed while somebody was out in the river on a roof, with nothing but a
rat to care whether he got drowned or not.
Where was Hen Billard, that always made fun so; or Archy Hawkins, that
pretended to be so good-natured; or Pony Baker, that seemed to like a
fellow so much? He began to call for them by name: "Hen Billard--_O_
Hen! Help, help! Archy Hawkins--_O_ Archy! I'm drowning! Pony, Pony--_O_
Pony! Don't you _see_ me, Pony?"
He could see the top of Pony Baker's house, and he thought what a good,
kind man Pony's father was. Surely _he_ would try to save him; and Jim
Leonard began to yell: "O Mr. Baker! Look here, Mr. Baker! It's Jim
Leonard, and I'm floating down the river on a roof! Save me, Mr. Baker,
save me! Help, help, somebody! Fire! Fire! Fire! Murder! Fire!"
By this time he was about crazy, and did not half know what he was
saying. Just in front of where Hen Billard's grandmother lived, on the
street that ran along the top of the bank, the roof got caught in the
branches of a tree which had drifted down and stuck in the bottom of the
river so that the branches waved up and down as the current swashed
through them. Jim Leonard was glad of anything that would stop the roof,
and at first he thought he would get off on the tree. That was what the
rat did. Perhaps the rat thought Jim Leonard really was crazy and he had
better let him have the roof to himself; but the rat saw that he had
made a mistake, and he jumped back again after he had swung up and down
on a limb two or three times. Jim Leonard felt awfully when the rat
first got into the tree, for he remembered how it said in the Pirate
Book that rats always leave a sinking ship, and now he believed that he
certainly was gone. But that only made him hollo the louder, and he
holloed so loud that at last he made somebody hear.
It was Hen Billard's grandmother, and she put her head out of the window
with her nightcap on, to see what the matter was. Jim Leonard caught
sight of her, and he screamed: "Fire, fire, fire! I'm drownding, Mrs.
Billard! Oh, do somebody come!"
Hen Billard's grandmother just gave one yell of "Fire! The world's
a-burnin' up, Hen Billard, and you layin' there sleepin' and not helpin'
a bit! Somebody's out there in the river!" and she rushed into the room
where Hen was, and shook him.
He bounced out of bed and pulled on his pantaloons, and was down-stairs
in a minute. He ran bareheaded over to the bank, and when Jim Leonard
saw him coming he holloed ten times as loud: "It's me, Hen! It's Jim
Leonard! Oh, do get somebody to come out and save me! Fire!"
As soon as Hen heard that, and felt sure it was not a dream, which he
did in about half a second, he began to yell, too, and to say: "How did
you get there? Fire, fire, fire! What are you on? Fire! Are you in a
tree, or what? Fire, fire! Are you in a flat-boat? Fire, fire, fire! If
I had a skiff--fire!"
He kept racing up and down the bank, and back and forth between the bank
and the houses. The river was almost up to the top of the bank, and it
looked a mile wide. Down at the bridge you could hardly see any light
between the water and the bridge.
Pretty soon people began to look out of their doors and windows, and Hen
Billard's grandmother kept screaming: "The world's a-burnin' up! The
river's on fire!" Then boys came out of their houses; and then men with
no hats on; and then women and girls, with their hair half down. The
fire-bells began to ring, and in less than five minutes both the fire
companies were on the shore, with the men at the brakes and the foremen
of the companies holloing through their trumpets.
Then Jim Leonard saw what a good thing it was that he had thought of
holloing fire. He felt sure now that they would save him somehow, and he
made up his mind to save the rat, too, and pet it, and maybe go around
and exhibit it. He would name it Bolivar; it was just the color of the
elephant Bolivar that came to the Boy's Town every year. These things
whirled through his brain while he watched two men setting out in a
skiff toward him.
They started from the shore a little above him, and they meant to row
slanting across to his tree, but the current, when they got fairly into
it, swept them far below, and they were glad to row back to land again
without ever getting anywhere near him. At the same time, the tree-top
where his roof was caught was pulled southward by a sudden rush of the
torrent; it opened, and the roof slipped out, with Jim Leonard and the
rat on it. They both joined in one squeal of despair as the river leaped
forward with them, and a dreadful "Oh!" went up from the people on the
bank.
Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that the
skiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of the
window of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand.
It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the men
used to catch driftwood with and drag it ashore. When the people saw
Blue Bob with that pole in his hand, they understood what he was up to.
He was going to wait till the water brought the roof with Jim Leonard on
it down to the bridge, and then catch the hook into the shingles and
pull it up to the pier. The strongest current set close in around the
middle pier, and the roof would have to pass on one side or the other.
That was what Blue Bob argued out in his mind when he decided that the
skiff would never reach Jim Leonard, and he knew that if he could not
save him that way, nothing could save him.
Blue Bob must have had a last name, but none of the little fellows knew
what it was. Everybody called him Blue Bob because he had such a thick,
black beard that when he was just shaved his face looked perfectly blue.
He knew all about the river and its ways, and if it had been of any use
to go out with a boat, he would have gone. That was what all the boys
said, when they followed Blue Bob to the bridge and saw him getting out
on the pier. He was the only person that the watchman had let go on the
bridge for two days.
The water was up within three feet of the floor, and if Jim Leonard's
roof slipped by Blue Bob's guard and passed under the bridge, it would
scrape Jim Leonard off, and that would be the last of him.
All the time the roof was coming nearer the bridge, sometimes slower,
sometimes faster, just as it got into an eddy or into the current; once
it seemed almost to stop, and swayed completely round; then it just
darted forward.
Blue Bob stood on the very point of the pier, where the strong
stone-work divided the current, and held his hooked pole ready to make a
clutch at the roof, whichever side it took. Jim Leonard saw him there,
but although he had been holloing and yelling and crying all the time,
now he was still. He wanted to say, "O Bob, save me!" but he could not
make a sound.
It seemed to him that Bob was going to miss him when he made a lunge at
the roof on the right side of the pier; it seemed to him that the roof
was going down the left side; but he felt it quiver and stop, and then
it gave a loud crack and went to pieces, and flung itself away upon the
whirling and dancing flood. At first Jim Leonard thought he had gone
with it; but it was only the rat that tried to run up Blue Bob's pole,
and slipped off into the water; and then somehow Jim was hanging onto
Blue Bob's hands and scrambling onto the bridge.
Blue Bob always said he never saw any rat, and a good many people said
there never was any rat on the roof with Jim Leonard; they said that he
just made the rat up.
He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Baker
that he did not think of it at first, he was so excited.
Pony asked his father what he thought, and Pony's father said that it
might have been the kind of rat that people see when they have been
drinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he had
signed the temperance pledge.
But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonard
standing safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular election
cheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They all
agreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to his
mother, for he had saved Jim's life, and he ought to have the credit of
it.