The Flight of Pony Baker / A Boy's Town Story

by William Dean Howells

It was near sunset, on a cool day in the beginning of October, and the wind was stirring the dry blades in the corn-patch at the side of the barn. They made a shivering sound, and it made Pony lonesomer and lonesomer. He did not want to run off, but he did not see how he could help it. Trip stood at the wood-house door, looking at him, but he did not dare to come to Pony as long as he was near the barn. But when Pony started towards the house Trip came running and jumping to him, and Pony patted him and said, “Poor Trip, poor old Trip!” He did not know when he should see such another dog as that.

The kitchen door was open, and a beautiful smell of frying supper was coming out. Pretty soon his mother came to the open door, and stood watching him patting Trip. “Well, have you made up with poor old Trip, Pony? Why don’t you come in, child? You look so cold, out there.”

Pony did not say anything, but he came into the kitchen and sat in a corner beyond the stove and watched his mother getting the supper. In the dining-room his sisters were setting the table and his father was reading by the lamp there. Pony would have given almost anything if something had happened just to make him tell what he was going to do, so that he could have been kept from doing it. He saw that his mother was watching him all the time, and she said: “What makes you so quiet, child?”

Pony said, “Oh, nothing,” and his mother asked, “Have you been falling out with Jim Leonard?”

Pony said no, and then she said, “I almost wish you had, then. I don’t think he’s a bad boy, but he’s a crazy fool, and I wish you wouldn’t go with him so much. I don’t like him.”

All of a sudden Pony felt that he did not like Jim Leonard very much himself. It seemed to him that Jim Leonard had not used him very well, but he could not have told how.

After supper the great thing was how to get out to the barn without any one’s noticing. Pony went to the woodshed door two or three times to look out. There were plenty of stars in the sky, but it seemed very dark, and he knew that it would be as black as pitch in the barn, and he did not see how he could ever dare to go out to it, much less into it. Every time he came back from looking he brought an armload of wood into the kitchen so that his mother would not notice.

The last time she said, “Why, you dear, good boy, what a lot of wood you’re bringing for your mother,” for usually Pony had to be told two or three times before he would get a single armload of wood.

When his mother praised him he was ashamed to look at her, and so he looked round, and he saw the lantern hanging by the mantel-piece. When he saw that lantern he almost wished that he had not seen it, for now he knew that his last excuse was gone, and he would really have to run off. If it had not been for the lantern he could have told Jim Leonard that he was afraid to go out to the barn on account of ghosts, for anybody would be afraid of ghosts; Jim Leonard said he was afraid of them himself. But now Pony could easily get the lantern and take it out to the barn with him, and if it was not dark the ghosts would not dare to touch you.

He tried to think back to the beginning of the time when he first intended to run off, and find out if there was not some way of not doing it; but he could not, and if Jim Leonard was to come to the barn the next morning to help him start, and should not find him there, Pony did not know what he would do. Jim Leonard would tell all the fellows, and Pony would never hear the last of it. That was the way it seemed to him, but his mind felt all fuzzy, and he could not think very clearly about it.