THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER: A Boy's Town Story (Illustrated)

This carefully crafted ebook: 'THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER: A Boy's Town Story (Illustrated)' is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
The Flight of Pony Baker is a novel for children which tells the story of a young boy named Pony Baker who, throughout the book, attempts to run away from his home where he lives with his mother, father, and five sisters. The setting of the story is 'fifty years ago' in the Boy's Town of Ohio, the state where Howells was born and raised. Pony lives in the Boy's Town with his mother, father, and five sisters, whom his mother always wants him to play with. Pony's mother is very overprotective of Pony, which makes her a bad mother when it comes to having fun. Pony's father has done some things that have given Pony the right to run away as well. An older boy named Jim Leonard suggests that Pony go with the Indians and that the Indians would like him and then adopt him into their tribe.
Extract:
'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.'
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright.

This carefully crafted ebook: "THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER: A Boy's Town Story (Illustrated)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
The Flight of Pony Baker is a novel for children which tells the story of a young boy named Pony Baker who, throughout the book, attempts to run away from his home where he lives with his mother, father, and five sisters. The setting of the story is "fifty years ago" in the Boy's Town of Ohio, the state where Howells was born and raised. Pony lives in the Boy's Town with his mother, father, and five sisters, whom his mother always wants him to play with. Pony's mother is very overprotective of Pony, which makes her a bad mother when it comes to having fun. Pony's father has done some things that have given Pony the right to run away as well. An older boy named Jim Leonard suggests that Pony go with the Indians and that the Indians would like him and then adopt him into their tribe.
Extract:
"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."
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright.

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IV. The Scrape That Jim Leonard Got The Boys Into
Table of Contents As I said, it was in the spring that Jim Leonard's hair-breadth escape happened. But it was late in the summer of that very same year that he got Pony Baker and all the rest of the boys into about one of the worst scrapes that the Boy's Town boys were ever in.

At first, it was more like a dare than anything else, for when Jim Leonard said he knew a watermelon patch that the owner had no use for, the other boys dared him to tell where it was. He wagged his head, and said that he knew, and then they dared him to tell whose patch it was; and all at once he said it was Bunty Williams's, and dared them to come and get the melons with him. None of the boys in the Boy's Town would take a dare, and so they set off with Jim Leonard, one sunny Saturday morning in September.

Some of the boys had their arms round one another's necks, talking as loud as they could into one another's faces, and some whooping and holloing, and playing Indian, and some throwing stones and scaring cats. They had nearly as many dogs as there were boys, and there were pretty nearly all the boys in the neighborhood. There seemed to be thirty or forty of them, they talked so loud and ran round so, but perhaps there were only ten or eleven. Hen Billard was along, and so were Piccolo Wright and Archie Hawkins, and then a great lot of little fellows.

Pony Baker was not quite a little fellow in age; and there was something about him that always made the big boys let him go with their crowd. But now, when they passed Pony's gate and his mother saw them, and because it was such a warm morning and she thought they might be going down to the river and called out to him, "You mustn't go in swimming, Pony, dear; you'll get the ague," they began to mock Pony as soon as they got by, and to hollo, "No, Pony, dear! You mustn't get the ague. Keep out of the water if you don't want your teeth to rattle, Pony, dear!"

This made Pony so mad that he began to cry and try to fight them, and they all formed in a ring round him and danced and whooped till he broke through and started home. Then they ran after him and coaxed him not to do it, and said that they were just in fun. After that they used Pony first-rate, and he kept on with them.

Jim Leonard was at the head, walking along and holloing to the fellows to hurry up. They had to wade the river, and he was showing off how he could hop, skip, and jump through, when he stepped on a slippery stone and sat down in the water and made the fellows laugh. But they acted first-rate with him when they got across; they helped him to take off his trousers and wring them out, and they wrung them so hard that they tore them a little, but they were a little torn already; and they wrung them so dry that he said they felt splendid when he got them on again. One of his feet went through the side of the trouser leg that was torn before it got to the end, and made the fellows laugh.

When the boys first started Jim said he had got to go ahead so as to be sure that they found the right patch. He now said that Bunty Williams had two patches, one that he was going to sell the melons out of, and the other that he was going to let them go to seed in; and it was the second melon patch that he had deserted.

But pretty soon after they got over the river he came back and walked with the rest of the boys, and when they came to a piece of woods which they had to go through, he dropped behind. He said it was just the place for Indian, and he wanted to be where he could get at them if they started up when the boys got by, as they would very likely do.

Some of the big fellows called him a cowardy-calf; but he said he would show them when the time came, and most of the little boys believed him and tried to get in front. It was not long before he stopped and asked, What if he could not find the right patch?