Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was a splendid circus, and there were more things than Pony ever saw in a circus before. But instead of hating to have it over, it seemed to him that it would never come to an end. He kept thinking and thinking, and wondering whether he would like to be a circus actor; and when the one came out who rode four horses bareback and stood on his head on the last horse, and drove with the reins in his teeth, Pony thought that he never could learn to do it; and if he could not learn he did not know what the circus men would say to him. It seemed to him that it was very strange he had not told that circus man that he didn’t know whether he could do it or not; but he had not, and now it was too late.

  A boy came around calling lemonade, and Pony’s father bought some for each of the children, but Pony could hardly taste his.

  “What is the matter with you, Pony? Are you sick?” his father asked.

  “No. I don’t care for any; that’s all. I’m well,” said Pony; but he felt very miserable.

  After supper Jim Leonard came round and went up to Pony’s room with him to help him pack, and he was so gay about it and said he only wished he was going, that Pony cheered up a little. Jim had brought a large square of checked gingham that he said he did not believe his mother would ever want, and that he would tell her he had taken if she asked for it. He said it would be the very thing for Pony to carry his clothes in, for it was light and strong and would hold a lot. He helped Pony to choose his things out of his bureau drawers: a pair of stockings and a pair of white pantaloons and a blue roundabout, and a collar, and two handkerchiefs. That was all he said Pony would need, because he would have his circus clothes right away, and there was no use taking things that he would never wear.

  Jim did these up in the square of gingham, and he tied it across cater-cornered twice, in double knots, and showed Pony how he could put his hand through and carry it just as easy. He hid it under the bed for him, and he told Pony that if he was in Pony’s place he should go to bed right away or pretty soon, so that nobody would think anything, and maybe he could get some sleep before he got up and went down to wait on the front steps for the circus to come along. He promised to be there with the other boys and keep them from fooling or making a noise, or doing anything to wake his father up, or make the constable come. “You see, Pony,” he said, “if you can run off this year, and come back with the circus next year, then a whole lot of fellows can run off. Don’t you see that?”

  Pony said he saw that, but he said he wished some of the other fellows were going now, because he did not know any of the circus boys and he was afraid he might feel kind of lonesome. But Jim Leonard said he would soon get acquainted, and, anyway, a year would go before he knew it, and then if the other fellows could get off he would have plenty of company.

  As soon as Jim Leonard was gone Pony undressed and got into bed. He was not sleepy, but he thought maybe it would be just as well to rest a little while before the circus procession came along for him; and, anyway, he could not bear to go down-stairs and be with the family when he was going to leave them so soon, and not come back for a whole year.

  After a good while, or about the time he usually came in from playing, he heard his mother saying: “Where in the world is Pony? Has he come in yet? Have you seen him, girls? Pony! Pony!” she called.

  But somehow Pony could not get his voice up out of his throat; he wanted to answer her, but he could not speak. He heard her say, “Go out to the front steps, girls, and see if you can see him,” and then he heard her coming up the stairs; and she came into his room, and when she saw him lying there in bed she said: “Why, I believe in my heart the child’s asleep! Pony! Are you awake?”

  Pony made out to say no, and his mother said: “My! what a fright you gave me! Why didn’t you answer me? Are you sick, Pony? Your father said you didn’t seem well at the circus; and you didn’t eat any supper, hardly.”

  Pony said he was first-rate, but he spoke very low, and his mother came up and sat down on the side of his bed.

  “What is the matter, child?” She bent over and felt his forehead. “No, you haven’t got a bit of fever,” she said, and she kissed him, and began to tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one of his hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. “But you’ve had a long, tiresome day, and that’s why you’ve gone to bed, I suppose. But if you feel the least sick, Pony, I’ll send for the doctor.”

  Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he felt as if he never wanted to get up again.

  His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close down to his, and said very low: “Pony, dear, you don’t feel hard towards your mother for what she did the other night?”

  He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and he said: “Oh no,” and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; and she told him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again; but she was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing.

  When he quieted down she said: “Now say your prayers, Pony, ‘Our Father,’” and she said “Our Father” all through with him, and after that, “Now I lay me,” just as when he was a very little fellow. After they had finished she stooped over and kissed him again, and when he turned his face into his pillow she kept smoothing his hair with her hand for about a minute. Then she went away.

  Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. His father came in from up-town at last and asked:

  “Has Pony come in?” and his mother said:

  “Yes, he’s up in bed. I wouldn’t disturb him, Henry. He’s asleep by this time.”

  His father said: “I don’t know what to make of the boy. If he keeps on acting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning.”

  Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in the morning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down to his father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it did not seem as if he could.

  By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thought it was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew that the procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on his things as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve to it, somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers to keep it on. He got his bundle and stole down to the front door without seeming to touch his feet to anything, and when he got out on the front steps he saw the circus magician coming along. By that time the music had stopped and Pony could not see any procession. The magician had on a tall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was so wide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretched them out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand in one hand, like a blind man.

  He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice: “It’s all glory; it’s all glory,” and the sound of those words froze Pony’s blood. He tried to get back into the house again, so that the magician should not find him, but when he felt for the door-knob there was no door there anywhere; nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried to shrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw his wide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and the doctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:

  “He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled,” and he got out his lancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: “Pony, Pony! What’s the matter? Have you got the nightmare?” and he woke up, and found it was just morning.

  The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to think that by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, that he hardly knew what to do.

  He was not very well for two or three days afterwards, and his mother let him stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick or not. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he had been going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened to think of it plagued hi
m a little and asked how he liked being a circus actor.

  Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician got scared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men that they would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reason why they didn’t take him. Archy Hawkins said: “How long did you have to wait on the front steps, Pony, dear?” But after that he was pretty good to him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretend that Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see.

  Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on the front steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed all of it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried to help him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he had overslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way he said, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and how much was not.

  X

  THE ADVENTURES THAT PONY’S COUSIN, FRANK BAKER, HAD WITH A POCKETFUL OF MONEY

  Very likely Pony Baker would not have tried to run off any more if it had not been for Jim Leonard. He was so glad he had not got off with the circus that he did not mind any of the things at home that used to vex him; and it really seemed as if his father and mother were trying to act better. They were a good deal taken up with each other, and sometimes he thought they let him do things they would not have let him do if they had noticed what he asked. His mother was fonder of him than ever, and if she had not kissed him so much before the fellows he would not have cared, for when they were alone he liked to have her pet him. But one thing was, he could never get her to like Jim Leonard, or to believe that Jim was not leading him into mischief whenever they were off together. She was always wanting him to go with his cousin Frank, and he would have liked to ask Frank about running off, and whether a fellow had better do it; but he was ashamed, and especially after he heard his father tell how splendidly Frank had behaved with two thousand dollars he was bringing from the city to the Boy’s Town; Pony was afraid that Frank would despise him, and he did not hardly feel fit to go with Frank, anyway.

  “frank baker was one of those fellows

  that every mother would feel her boy

  was safe with”

  Frank Baker was one of those fellows that every mother would feel her boy was safe with. She would be sure that no crowd he was in was going to do any harm or come to any, for he would have an anxious eye out for everybody, and he would stand between the crowd and the mischief that a crowd of boys nearly always wants to do. His own mother felt easy about the younger children when they were with Frank; and in a place where there were more chances for a boy to get sucked under mill-wheels, and break through ice, and fall from bridges, or have his fingers taken off by machinery than any other place I ever heard of, she no more expected anything to happen to them, if he had them in charge, than if she had them in charge herself.

  As there were a good many other children in the family, and Mrs. Baker did her own work, like nearly every mother in the Boy’s Town, Frank almost always had some of them in charge. When he went hunting, or fishing, or walnutting, or berrying, or in swimming, he usually had one or two younger brothers with him; if he had only one, he thought he was having the greatest kind of a time.

  He did not mind carrying his brother on his back when he got tired, although it was not exactly the way to steal on game, and the gun was a heavy enough load, anyway; but if he had not got many walnuts, or any at all — as sometimes happened — it was not a great hardship to haul his brother home in the wagon. To be sure, when he wanted to swim out with the other big boys it was pretty trying to have to keep an eye on his brother, and see that he did not fall into the water from the bank where he left him.

  He was a good deal more anxious about other boys than he was about himself, and once he came near getting drowned through his carelessness. It was in winter, and the canal basin had been frozen over; then most of the water was let out from under the ice, and afterwards partly let in again. This lifted the ice-sheet, but not back to its old level, and the ice that clung to the shores shelved steeply down to the new level. Frank stepped on this shore ice to get a shinny-ball, and slipped down to the edge of the ice-sheet, which he would be sure to go under into the water. He holloed with all his might, and by good luck some people came and reached him a stick, by which he pulled himself out.

  The scare of it haunted him for long after, but not so much for himself. Whenever he was away from home in the winter he would see one of his younger brothers slipping down the shore ice and going under the ice-sheet, and he would break into a cold sweat at the idea. This shows just the worrying kind of boy Frank was; and it shows how used he was to having care put upon him, and how he would even borrow trouble when he had none.

  It generally happens with any one who makes himself useful that other people make him useful, too, and all the neighbors put as much trust in Frank as his mother, and got him to do a good many things that they would not have got other boys to do. They could not look into his face, a little more careworn than it ought to be at his age, without putting perfect faith in him, and trying to get something out of him. That was how he came to do so many errands for mothers who had plenty of boys of their own; and he seemed to be called on in any sort of trouble or danger, when the fathers were up-town, and was always chasing pigs or cows out of other people’s gardens, and breaking up their hens from setting, or going up trees with hives to catch their bees when they swarmed.

  I suppose this was how he came to be trusted with that pocketful of money, and why he had a young brother along to double his care at the time.

  The money was given him in the city, as the Boy’s Town boys always called the large place about twenty miles away, where Frank went once with his mother when he was eleven years old. She was going to take passage there on a steamboat and go up the Ohio River to visit his grandmother with his sisters, while Frank was to go back the same day to the Boy’s Town with one of his young brothers.

  They all drove down to the city together in the carriage which one of his uncles had got from the livery stable, with a driver who was to take Frank and his brother home. This uncle had been visiting Frank’s father and mother, and it was his boat that she was going on. It lay among a hundred other boats, which had their prows tight together along the landing for half a mile up and down the sloping shore. It was one of the largest boats of all, and it ran every week from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, and did not take any longer for the round trip than an ocean steamer takes now for the voyage from New York to Liverpool.

  The children all had dinner on board, such a dinner as there never was in any house: roast beef and roast chicken; beefsteak and ham in chafing-dishes with lamps burning under them to keep them hot; pound-cake with frosting on, and pies and pickles, corn-bread and hot biscuit; jelly that kept shaking in moulds; ice-cream and Spanish pudding; coffee and tea, and I do not know what all.

  When the children had eaten all they could hold, and made their uncle laugh till he almost cried, to see them trying to eat everything, their mother went ashore with them, and walked up the landing towards the hotel where the carriage was left, so as to be with Frank and his little brother as long as she could before they started home. She was about one of the best mothers in the Boy’s Town, and Frank hated to have her go away even on a visit.

  She kept giving him charges about all the things at home, and how he must take good care of his little brothers, and see that the garden gate was fastened so that the cows could not get in, and feed the chickens regularly, and put the cat out every night, and not let the dog sleep under his bed; and they were so busy talking and feeling sorry that they got to the hotel before they knew it.

  There, whom should they see but one of the Boy’s Town merchants, who was in the city on business, and who seemed as glad to meet them as if they were his own relations. They were glad, too, for it made them feel as if they had got back to the Boy’s Town when he
came up and spoke to Mrs. Baker. They had started from home after a very early breakfast, and she said it seemed as if they had been gone a year already. The merchant told her that he had been looking everywhere for somebody he knew who was going to the Boy’s Town; and then he told Mrs. Baker that he had two thousand dollars which he wanted to send home to his partner, and he asked her if she could take it for him when she went back.

  “Well, indeed, indeed, I’m thankful I’m not going, Mr. Bushell!” Mrs. Baker said. “And I wouldn’t have supposed I could be, I’m so homesick. I’m going up the river on a visit to mother; but if I was going straight back, I wouldn’t take your two thousand dollars for the half of it. I would be afraid of losing it, or getting robbed and murdered. I don’t know what wouldn’t happen. I would be happy to oblige you, but indeed, indeed I couldn’t!”

  The merchant said he was sorry, but if she was not going home he supposed he would have to find some one who was. It was before the days of sending money by express, or telegraphing it, and the merchant told her he was afraid to trust the money in the mail. He asked her who was going to take her carriage home, and she told him the name of the driver from the livery stable in the Boy’s Town, who had come to the city with them.

  Mr. Bushell seemed dreadfully disappointed, but when she went on to say how anxious she was that the driver should get Frank and his brother home before dark, he brightened up all of a sudden, and he asked, “Is Frank going back?” and he looked down into Frank’s face and smiled, as most people did when they looked into Frank’s face, and he asked, “What’s the reason Frank couldn’t take it?”

  Mrs. Baker put her arm across Frank’s breast and pulled him away, and said, “Indeed, indeed, the child just sha’n’t, and that’s all about it!”