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

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СКАЧАТЬ they went to a pump at the nearest house, where the woman said they might have a drink, and drank themselves full. They wanted awfully to ask her for some salt, but they did not dare to do it for fear she would make them tell what they wanted it for. So they came away without, and Jim said they could put ashes on their potatoes the way the Indians did, and it would be just as good as salt.

      They ran back to the river bank, and ran along up it till they were out of sight of the boys on the shore below, and then they made their oven in it, and started their fire with some matches that Jim Leonard had in his pocket, so that if he ever got lost in the woods at night he could make a fire and keep from freezing. His tooth had stopped aching now, and he kept telling such exciting stories about Indians that Pony could not seem to get the chance to ask why Bunty Williams should take after the boys with his shotgun and bulldog if he had given up the watermelon patch and only wanted it for seed.

      The question lurked in Pony’s mind all the time that they were waiting for the potatoes to bake, but somehow he could not get it out. He did not feel very well, and he tried to forget his bad feelings by listening as hard as he could to Jim Leonard’s stories. Jim kept taking the potatoes out to see if they were done enough, and he began to eat them while they were still very hard and greenish under the skin. Pony ate them, too, although he was not hungry now, and he did not think the ashes were as good as salt on them, as Jim pretended. The potato he ate seemed to make him feel no better, and at last he had to tell Jim that he was afraid he was going to be sick.

      Jim said that if they could heat some stones, and get a blanket anywhere, and put it over Pony and the stones, and then pour water on the hot stones, they could give him a steam bath the way the Indians did, and it would cure him in a minute; they could get the stones easy enough, and he could bring water from the river in his straw hat, but the thing of it was to get the blanket.

      He stood looking thoughtfully down at Pony, who was crying now, and begging Jim Leonard to go home with him, for he did not believe he could walk on account of the pain that seemed to curl him right up. He asked Jim if he believed he was beginning to have the ague, but Jim said it was more like the yellow janders, although he agreed that Pony had better go home, for it was pretty late, anyway.

      He made Pony promise that if he would take him home he would let him get a good way off before he went into the house, so that Pony’s father and mother should not see who had brought him. He said that when he had got off far enough he would hollo, and then Pony could go in. He was first-rate to Pony on the way home, and helped him to walk, and when the pain curled him up so tight that he could not touch his foot to the ground, Jim carried him.

      Pony could never know just what to make of Jim Leonard. Sometimes he was so good to you that you could not help thinking he was one of the cleverest fellows in town, and then all of a sudden he would do something mean. He acted the perfect coward at times, and at other times he was not afraid of anything. Almost any of the fellows could whip him, but once he went into an empty house that was haunted, and came and looked out of the garret windows, and dared any of them to come up.

      He offered now, if Pony did not want to go home and let his folks find out about the melon patch, to take him to his mother’s log-barn, and get a witch-doctor to come and tend him; but Pony said that he thought they had better keep on, and then Jim trotted and asked him if the jolting did not do him some good. He said he just wished there was an Indian medicine-man around somewhere.

      They were so long getting to Pony’s house that it was almost dusk when they reached the back of the barn, and Jim put him over the fence. Jim started to run, and Pony waited till he got out of sight and holloed; then he began to shout, “Father! Mother! O mother! Come out here! I’m sick!”

      It did not seem hardly a second till he heard his mother calling back: “Pony! Pony! Where are you, child? Where are you?”

      “Here, behind the barn!” he answered.

      Pony’s mother came running out, and then his father, and when they had put him into his own bed up-stairs, his mother made his father go for the doctor. While his father was gone, his mother got the whole story out of Pony—what he had been doing all day, and what he had been eating—but as to who had got him into the trouble, she said she knew from the start it must be Jim Leonard.

      After the doctor came and she told him what Pony had been eating, without telling all that he had been doing, the doctor gave him something to make him feel better. As soon as he said he felt better she began to talk very seriously to him, and to tell him how anxious she had been ever since she had seen him going off in the morning with Jim Leonard at the head of that crowd of boys.

      “Didn’t you know he couldn’t be telling the truth when he said the man had left his watermelon patch? Didn’t any of the boys?”

      “No,” said Pony, thoughtfully.

      “But when he pretended that he shouldn’t know the right patch, and wanted to turn back?”

      “We didn’t think anything. We thought he just wanted to get out of going. Ought they let him turn back? Maybe he meant to keep the patch all to himself.”

      His mother was silent, and Pony asked, “Do you believe that a boy has a right to take anything off a tree or a vine?”

      “No; certainly not.”

      “Well, that’s what I think, too.”

      “Why, Pony,” said his mother, “is there anybody who thinks such a thing can be right?”

      “Well, the boys say it’s not stealing. Stealing is hooking a thing out of a wagon or a store; but if you can knock a thing off a tree, or get it through a fence, when it’s on the ground already, then it’s just like gathering nuts in the woods. That’s what the boys say. Do you think it is?”

      “I think it’s the worst kind of stealing. I hope my boy doesn’t do such things.”

      “Not very often,” answered Pony, thoughtfully. “When there’s a lot of fellows together, you don’t want them to laugh at you.”

      “O Pony, dear!” said his mother, almost crying.

      “Well, anyway, mother,” Pony said, to cheer her up, “I didn’t take any of the watermelons to-day, for all Jim said Bunty had got done with them.”

      “I’m so glad to think you didn’t! And you must promise, won’t you, never to touch any fruit that doesn’t belong to you?”

      “But supposing an apple was to drop over the fence onto the sidewalk, what would you do then?”

      “I should throw it right back over the fence again,” said Pony’s mother.

      Pony promised his mother never to touch other people’s fruit, but he was glad she did not ask him to throw it back over the fence if it fell outside, for he knew the fellows would laugh.

      His father came back from going down-stairs with the doctor, and she told him all that Pony had told her, and it seemed to Pony that his father could hardly keep from laughing. But his mother did not even smile.

      “How could Jim Leonard tell them that a man would give up his watermelon patch, and how could they believe such a lie, poor, foolish boys?”

      “They wished to believe it,” said Pony’s father, “and so did Jim, I dare say.”

      “He СКАЧАТЬ