A BOY'S TOWN ADVENTURES: The Flight of Pony Baker, Boy Life, A Boy's Town & Years of My Youth. William Dean Howells

A BOY'S TOWN ADVENTURES: The Flight of Pony Baker, Boy Life, A Boy's Town & Years of My Youth

the barn, Pony?” and Pony was ashamed to say he was getting ready to run off. He began:

“Jim Leonard—” and his mother broke out:

“I knew it was some of Jim Leonard’s work!” and she talked against Jim Leonard until Pony fell asleep, and said Pony should never speak to him again.

She and Pony’s father sat up all night talking, and about daybreak he recollected that he had left the candle burning in the barn, and he ran out with all his might to get it before it set the barn on fire. But it had burned out without catching anything, and he was coming back to the house when he met Jim Leonard sneaking towards the barn door. He pounced on him, and caught him by the collar, and he said as savagely as he could: “What are you doing here, Jim?”

Jim Leonard was too scared to speak, and Pony’s father hauled him to the house door, and holloed in to Pony’s mother: “I’ve got Jim Leonard here, Lucy”; and she holloed back:

“Oh, well, take him away, and don’t let me see the dreadful boy!” and Pony’s father said:

“I’ll take him home to his mother, and see what she has to say to him.”

All the way down to the river-bank he did not say a word to Jim Leonard, but when they got to Jim Leonard’s mother’s house, there she was with her pipe in her mouth coming out to get chips to kindle the fire with, and she said:

“I’d like to know what you’ve got my boy by the collar for, Mr. Baker?”

Pony’s father said: “I don’t know myself; I’ll let him tell you. Pony was hid in the barn last night, and I just now caught Jim prowling around on the outside. I should like to hear what he wanted.”

Jim Leonard did not say anything. His mother gave him one look, and then she went into the house and came out with a table-knife in her hand.

She said, “I reckon I can get him to tell you,” and she went to a pear-tree that there was before her house and cut a long sucker from the foot of it. She came up to Jim and then she said: “Tell!”

She did not have to say it twice, and in about half a second he told how Pony had intended to run off and how he put him up to it, and everything. Pony’s father did not wait to see what Jim Leonard’s mother did to Jim.

When Pony woke in the morning he heard his mother saying: “I could almost think he had bewitched the child.”

His father said: “It really seems like a case of mesmeric influence.”

Pony was sick for about a week after that. When he got better his father had a very solemn talk with him, and asked why he ever dreamed of running away from his home, where they all loved him so. Pony could not tell. All the things that he used to be so mad about were like nothing to him now, and he was ashamed of them. His father did not try hard to make him tell. He explained to him what a miserable boy he would have been if he had really got away, and said he hoped his night’s experience in the barn would be a lesson to him.

That was what it turned out to be. But it seemed to be a lesson to his father and mother, too. They let him do more things, and his mother did not baby him so much before the boys. He thought she was trying to be a better mother to him, and, perhaps, she did not baby him so much because now he had a little brother for her to baby instead, that was born about a week after Pony tried to run off.

The End.