IV. THE SCRAPE THAT JIM LEONARD GOT THE
BOYS INTO 52
V. ABOUT RUNNING AWAY TO THE INDIAN
RESERVATION ON A CANAL-BOAT,
AND HOW THE PLAN FAILED 77
VI. HOW THE INDIANS CAME TO THE BOY'S
TOWN AND JIM LEONARD ACTED THE
COWARD 89
VII. HOW FRANK BAKER SPENT THE FOURTH AT
PAWPAW BOTTOM, AND SAW THE FOURTH
OF JULY BOY 105
VIII. HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR
RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS 141
IX. HOW PONY DID NOT QUITE GET OFF WITH
THE CIRCUS 152
X. THE ADVENTURES THAT PONY'S COUSIN,
FRANK BAKER, HAD WITH A POCKETFUL
OF MONEY 165
XI. HOW JIM LEONARD PLANNED FOR PONY BAKER
TO RUN OFF ON A RAFT 192
XII. HOW JIM LEONARD BACKED OUT, AND PONY
HAD TO GIVE IT UP 208
_Illustrations_
"ALL THE FELLOWS CAME ROUND
AND ASKED HIM WHAT HE WAS
GOING TO DO NOW" _Frontispiece_
"BEING DRESSED SO WELL WAS ONE
OF THE WORST THINGS THAT
WAS DONE TO HIM BY HIS
MOTHER" 4
"'I'LL LEARN THAT LIMB TO SLEEP
IN A COW-BARN!' 50
"REAL INDIANS, IN BLANKETS, WITH
BOWS AND ARROWS" 90
"VERY SMILING-LOOKING" 124
"HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF
WITH HER THE VERY NEXT MORNING" 144
"FRANK BAKER WAS ONE OF THOSE
FELLOWS THAT EVERY MOTHER
WOULD FEEL HER BOY WAS SAFE
WITH" 166
"'WHY, YOU AIN'T AFRAID, ARE
YOU, PONY?'" 204
_The Flight of Pony Baker_
_The Flight of Pony Baker_
I
PONY'S MOTHER, AND WHY HE HAD
A RIGHT TO RUN OFF
If there was any fellow in the Boy's Town fifty years ago who had a good
reason to run off it was Pony Baker. Pony was not his real name; it was
what the boys called him, because there were so many fellows who had to be
told apart, as Big Joe and Little Joe, and Big John and Little John, and
Big Bill and Little Bill, that they got tired of telling boys apart that
way; and after one of the boys called him Pony Baker, so that you could
know him from his cousin Frank Baker, nobody ever called him anything
else.
You would have known Pony from the other Frank Baker, anyway, if you had
seen them together, for the other Frank Baker was a tall, lank, tow-headed
boy, with a face so full of freckles that you could not have put a
pin-point between them, and large, bony hands that came a long way out of
his coat-sleeves; and the Frank Baker that I mean here was little and dark
and round, with a thick crop of black hair on his nice head; and he had
black eyes, and a smooth, swarthy face, without a freckle on it. He was
pretty well dressed in clothes that fitted him, and his hands were small
and plump. His legs were rather short, and he walked and ran with quick,
nipping steps, just like a pony; and you would have thought of a pony when
you looked at him, even if that had not been his nickname.
[Illustration: "BEING DRESSED SO WELL WAS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS
THAT WAS DONE TO HIM BY HIS MOTHER"]
That very thing of his being dressed so well was one of the worst things
that was done to him by his mother, who was always disgracing him before
the other boys, though she may not have known it. She never was willing
to have him go barefoot, and if she could she would have kept his shoes
on him the whole summer; as it was, she did keep them on till all the
other boys had been barefoot so long that their soles were as hard as
horn; and they could walk on broken glass, or anything, and had stumped
the nails off their big toes, and had grass cuts under their little ones,
and yarn tied into them, before Pony Baker was allowed to take his shoes
off in the spring. He would have taken them off and gone barefoot without
his mother's knowing it, and many of the boys said that he ought to do it;
but then she would have found it out by the look of his feet when he went
to bed, and maybe told his father about it.
Very likely his father would not have cared so much; sometimes he would
ask Pony's mother why she did not turn the boy barefoot with the other
boys, and then she would ask Pony's father if he wanted the child to take
his death of cold; and that would hush him up, for Pony once had a little
brother that died.
Pony had nothing but sisters, after that, and this was another thing that
kept him from having a fair chance with the other fellows. His mother
wanted him to play with his sisters, and she did not care, or else she did
not know, that a girl-boy was about the meanest thing there was, and that
if you played with girls you could not help being a girl-boy. Pony liked
to play with his sisters well enough when there were no boys around, but
when there were his mother did not act as if she could not see any
difference. The girls themselves were not so bad, and they often coaxed
their mother to let him go off with the other boys, when she would not
have let him without. But even then, if it was going in swimming, or
fishing, or skating before the ice was very thick, she would show that she
thought he was too little to take care of himself, and would make some big
boy promise that he would look after Pony; and all the time Pony would be
gritting his teeth, he was so mad.
Once, when Pony stayed in swimming all day with a crowd of fellows, she
did about the worst thing she ever did; she came down to the river-bank
and stood there, and called to the boys, to find out if Pony was with
them; and they all had to get into the water up to their necks before they
could bear to answer her, they were so ashamed; and Pony had to put on his
clothes and go home with her. He could see that she had been crying, and
that made him a little sorry, but not so very; and the most that he was
afraid of was that she would tell his father. But if she did he never knew
it, and that night she came to him after he went to bed, and begged him
so not to stay in swimming the whole day any more, and told him how
frightened she had been, that he had to promise; and then that made him
feel worse than ever, for he did not see how he could break his promise.
She was not exactly a bad mother, and she was not exactly a good mother.
If she had been really a good mother she would have let him do whatever he
wanted, and never made any trouble, and if she had been a bad mother she
would not have let him do anything; and then he could have done it without
her letting him. In some ways she was good enough; she would let him take
out things to the boys in the back yard from the table, and she put
apple-butter or molasses on when it was hot biscuit that he took out. Once
she let him have a birthday party, and had cake and candy-pulling and
lemonade, and nobody but boys, because he said that boys hated girls;
even his own sisters did not come. Sometimes she would give him money for
ice-cream, and if she could have got over being particular about his going
in swimming before he could swim, and pistols and powder and such things,
she would have done very well.
She was first-rate when he was sick, and nobody could take care of
him like her, cooling his pillow and making the bed easy, and keeping
everybody quiet; and when he began to get well she would cook things that
tasted better than anything you ever knew: stewed chicken, and toast with
gravy on, and things like that. Even when he was well, and just lonesome,
she would sit by his bed if he asked her, till he went to sleep, or got
quieted down; and if he was trying to make anything she would help him
all she could, but if it was something that you had to use a knife with
she was not much help.
It always seemed to Pony that she begrudged his going with the boys, and
she said how nice he used to keep his clothes before, and had such pretty
manners, and now he was such a sloven, and was so rude and fierce that she
was almost afraid of him. He knew that she was making fun about being
afraid of him; and if she did hate to have him go with some of the worst
boys, still she was willing to help in lots of ways. She gave him yarn to
make a ball with, and she covered it for him with leather. Sometimes she
seemed to do things for him that she would not do for his sisters, and she
often made them give up to him when they had a dispute.
She made a distinction between boys and girls, and did not make him help
with the housework. Of course he had to bring in wood, but all the fellows
had to do that, and they did not count it; what they hated was having to
churn, or wipe dishes after company. Pony's mother never made him do
anything like that; she said it was girls' work; and she would not let him
learn to milk, either, for she said that milking was women's work, and all
that Pony had to do with the cow was to bring her home from the pasture in
the evening.
Sometimes when there was company she would let him bring in a boy to the
second table, and she gave them all the preserves and cake that they could
eat. The kind of company she had was what nearly all the mothers had in
the Boy's Town; they asked a whole lot of other mothers to supper, and had
stewed chicken and hot biscuit, and tea and coffee, and quince and peach
preserves, and sweet tomato pickles, and cake with jelly in between, and
pound-cake with frosting on, and buttered toast, and maybe fried eggs and
ham. The fathers never seemed to come; or, if the father that belonged in
the house came, he did not go and sit in the parlor with the mothers after
supper, but went up-town, to the post-office, or to some of the lawyers'
offices, or else a store, and talked politics.
Pony never thought his mother was good looking, or, rather, he did not
think anything about that, and it always seemed to him that she must be a
pretty old woman; but once when she had company, and she came in from the
kitchen with the last dish, and put it on the table, one of the nicest of
the other mothers came up, and put her arm around Pony's mother, and said:
"How pretty you do look, Mrs. Baker! I just want to kiss you on those red
cheeks. I should say you were a girl, instead of having all those
children."
Pony was standing out on the porch with his five sisters, and when he
looked in through the door, and saw his mother with her head thrown back
laughing, and her face flushed from standing over the stove to cook the
supper, and her brown hair tossed a little, he did think that she was very
nice looking, and like the girls at school that were in the fourth reader;
and she was very nicely dressed, too, in a white muslin dress, with the
blue check apron she had been working in flung behind the kitchen door,
as she came into the sitting-room carrying the dish in one hand. He did
not know what the other mother meant by saying "all those children"; for
it was a small family for the Boy's Town, and he thought she must just be
fooling.
Sometimes his mother would romp with the children, or sing them funny,
old-fashioned songs, such as people used to sing when the country was
first settled and everybody lived in log cabins. When she got into one of
her joking times she would call Pony "Honey! Honey!" like the old colored
aunty that had the persimmon-tree in her yard; and if she had to go past
him she would wind her arm around his head and mumble the top of it with
her lips; and if there were any of the fellows there, and Pony would fling
her arm away because he hated to have her do it before them, she would
just laugh.
Of course, if she had been a good mother about everything else Pony would
not have minded that, but she was such a very bad mother about letting him
have fun, sometimes, that Pony could not overlook it, as he might have
done. He did not think that she ought to call him Pony before the boys,
for, though he did not mind the boys' calling him Pony, it was not the
thing for a fellow's mother, and it was sure to give them the notion she
babied him at home. Once, after she called him "Pony, dear!" the fellows
mocked her when they got away, and all of them called him "Pony, dear!"
till he began to cry and to stone them.
But the worst of her ways was about powder, and her not wanting him to
have it, or not wanting him to have it where there was fire. She would
never let him come near the stove with it, after one of the fellows had
tried to dry his powder on the stove when it had got wet from being pumped
on in his jacket-pocket while he was drinking at the pump, and the fellow
forgot to take it off the stove quick enough, and it almost blew his
mother up, and did pretty nearly scare her to death; and she would not let
him keep it in a bottle, or anything, but just loose in a paper, because
another of the fellows had begun to pour powder once from a bottle onto
a coal of fire, and the fire ran up the powder, and blew the bottle to
pieces, and filled the fellow's face so full of broken glass that the
doctor was nearly the whole of that Fourth of July night getting it out.
So, although she was a good mother in some things, she was a bad mother in
others, and these were the great things; and they were what gave him the
right to run off.