The Flight of Pony Baker | Page 4

the mothers after supper, but went
up-town, to the post-office, or to some of the lawyers' offices, or else a
store, and talked politics.
Pony never thought his mother was good looking, or, rather, he did not
think anything about that, and it always seemed to him that she must be
a pretty old woman; but once when she had company, and she came in
from the kitchen with the last dish, and put it on the table, one of the
nicest of the other mothers came up, and put her arm around Pony's
mother, and said:
"How pretty you do look, Mrs. Baker! I just want to kiss you on those
red cheeks. I should say you were a girl, instead of having all those
children."
Pony was standing out on the porch with his five sisters, and when he
looked in through the door, and saw his mother with her head thrown
back laughing, and her face flushed from standing over the stove to
cook the supper, and her brown hair tossed a little, he did think that she
was very nice looking, and like the girls at school that were in the
fourth reader; and she was very nicely dressed, too, in a white muslin
dress, with the blue check apron she had been working in flung behind
the kitchen door, as she came into the sitting-room carrying the dish in
one hand. He did not know what the other mother meant by saying "all
those children"; for it was a small family for the Boy's Town, and he
thought she must just be fooling.
Sometimes his mother would romp with the children, or sing them
funny, old-fashioned songs, such as people used to sing when the
country was first settled and everybody lived in log cabins. When she
got into one of her joking times she would call Pony "Honey! Honey!"
like the old colored aunty that had the persimmon-tree in her yard; and
if she had to go past him she would wind her arm around his head and
mumble the top of it with her lips; and if there were any of the fellows
there, and Pony would fling her arm away because he hated to have her
do it before them, she would just laugh.

Of course, if she had been a good mother about everything else Pony
would not have minded that, but she was such a very bad mother about
letting him have fun, sometimes, that Pony could not overlook it, as he
might have done. He did not think that she ought to call him Pony
before the boys, for, though he did not mind the boys' calling him Pony,
it was not the thing for a fellow's mother, and it was sure to give them
the notion she babied him at home. Once, after she called him "Pony,
dear!" the fellows mocked her when they got away, and all of them
called him "Pony, dear!" till he began to cry and to stone them.
But the worst of her ways was about powder, and her not wanting him
to have it, or not wanting him to have it where there was fire. She
would never let him come near the stove with it, after one of the
fellows had tried to dry his powder on the stove when it had got wet
from being pumped on in his jacket-pocket while he was drinking at the
pump, and the fellow forgot to take it off the stove quick enough, and it
almost blew his mother up, and did pretty nearly scare her to death; and
she would not let him keep it in a bottle, or anything, but just loose in a
paper, because another of the fellows had begun to pour powder once
from a bottle onto a coal of fire, and the fire ran up the powder, and
blew the bottle to pieces, and filled the fellow's face so full of broken
glass that the doctor was nearly the whole of that Fourth of July night
getting it out. So, although she was a good mother in some things, she
was a bad mother in others, and these were the great things; and they
were what gave him the right to run off.

II
THE RIGHT THAT PONY HAD TO RUN OFF, FROM THE WAY
HIS FATHER ACTED
Pony had a right to run off from some of the things that his father had
done, but it seemed to him that they were mostly things that his mother
had put his father up to, and that his father would not have been half as
bad if he had been let alone. In the Boy's Town the fellows celebrated
Christmas just as they did Fourth of July, by firing