A BOY'S TOWN ADVENTURES: The Flight of Pony Baker, Boy Life, A Boy's Town & Years of My Youth. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 might have got some of them killed, if Bunty Williams had fired his gun at them,” said Pony’s mother; and he could see that she was not half-satisfied with what his father said.
“Perhaps it was a hoe, after all. You can’t shoot anybody with a hoe-handle, and there is nothing to prove that it was a gun but Jim’s word.”
“Yes, and here poor Pony has been so sick from it all, and Jim Leonard gets off without anything.”
“You are always wanting the tower to fall on the wicked,” said Pony’s father, laughing. “When it came to the worst, Jim didn’t take the melons any more than Pony did. And he seems to have wanted to back out of the whole affair at one time.”
“Oh! And do you think that excuses him?”
“No, I don’t. But I think he’s had a worse time, if that’s any comfort, than Pony has. He has suffered the fate of all liars. Sooner or later their lies outwit them and overmaster them, for whenever people believe a liar he is forced to act as if he had spoken the truth. That’s worse than having a tower fall on you, or pains in the stomach.”
Pony’s mother was silent for a moment as if she could not answer, and then she said, “Well, all I know is, I wish there was no such boy in this town as Jim Leonard.”
V. About Running Away To The Indian Reservation On A Canal-boat, And How The Plan Failed
Now, anybody can see the kind of a boy that Jim Leonard was, pretty well; and the strange thing of it was that he could have such a boy as Pony Baker under him so. But, anyway, Pony liked Jim, as much as his mother hated him, and he believed everything Jim said in spite of all that had happened.
After Jim promised to find out whether there was any Indian reservation that you could walk to, he pretended to study out in the geography that the only reservation there was in the State was away up close to Lake Erie, but it was not far from the same canal that ran through the Boy’s Town to the lake, and Jim said, “I’ll tell you what, Pony! The way to do will be to get into a canal-boat, somehow, and that will take you to the reservation without your hardly having to walk a step; and you can have fun on the boat, too.”
Pony agreed that this would be the best way, but he did not really like the notion of living so long among the Indians that he would not remember his father and mother when he saw them; he would like to stay till he was pretty nearly grown up, and then come back in a chief’s dress, with eagle plumes all down his back and a bow in his hand, and scare them a little when he first came in the house and then protect them from the tribe and tell them who he was, and enjoy their surprise. But he hated to say this to Jim Leonard, because he would think he was afraid to live with the Indians always. He hardly dared to ask him what the Indians would do to him if they did not adopt him, but he thought he had better, and Jim said:
“Oh, burn you, maybe. But it ain’t likely but what they’ll adopt you; and if they do they’ll take you down to the river, and wash you and scrub you, so’s to get all the white man off, and then pull out your hair, a hair at a time, till there’s nothing but the scalp-lock left, so that your enemies can scalp you handy; and then you’re just as good an Indian as anybody, and nobody can pick on you, or anything. The thing is how to find the canal-boat.”
The next morning at school it began to be known that Pony Baker was going to run off on a canal-boat to see the Indians, and all the fellows said how he ought to do it. One of the fellows said that he ought to get to drive the boat horses, and another that he ought to hide on board in the cargo, and come out when the boat was passing the reservation; and another that he ought to go for a cabin-boy on one of the passenger-packets, and then he could get to the Indians twice as soon as he could on a freight-boat. But the trouble was that Pony was so little that they did not believe they would take him either for a driver or a cabin-boy; and