off pistols and
shooting crackers, and one Christmas one of the fellows' pistols burst
and blew the ball of his thumb open, and when a crowd of the fellows
helped him past Pony's house, crying and limping (the pain seemed to
go down his leg, and lame him), Pony's mother made his father take
Pony's pistol right away from him, and not let him have it till after New
Year's; and what made it worse was that Pony had faithfully kept his
promise to her that he would not fire anything out of his pistol but
paper wads, while all the other fellows were firing shot, and tacks, and
little marbles, out of theirs; and some of them tried to shame him into
breaking his word, and he had to stand their calling him cry-baby, and
everything.
Then, she would not let his father get him a gun to go hunting with,
because he would have to fire something besides wads out of that, and
would be sure to kill himself. Pony told her that he would not kill
himself, and tried to laugh her out of the notion, but it was no use, and
he never had a gun till he was twelve years old; he was nine at the time
I mean. One of the fellows who was only eight was going to have a gun
as soon as his brother got done with his.
She would hardly let his father get him a dog, and I suppose it was
something but Pony's disappointment about the gun that made her agree
to the dog at last; even then she would not agree to his having it before
it had its eyes open, when the great thing about a puppy was its not
having its eyes open, and it was fully two weeks old before he was
allowed to bring it home, though he was taken to choose it before it
could walk very well, and he went every day afterwards to see how it
was getting along, and to watch out that it did not get changed with the
other little dogs. The first night after he got it to his own house, the dog
whined so with homesickness that it kept everybody awake till Pony
went to the woodshed, where it was in the clothes-basket, and took it
into his own bed; then it went to sleep, and did not whine a bit. His
father let him keep it there that one night, but the next he made him put
it out again, because he said it would get the house full of fleas; and he
said if it made much more trouble he would make Pony take it back.
He was not a very good father about money, because when Pony went
to ask him for a five-cent piece he always wanted to know what it was
for, and even when it was for a good thing a fellow did not always like
to tell. If his father did not think it was a good thing he would not let
Pony have it, and then Pony would be ashamed to go back to the boys,
for they would say his father was stingy, though perhaps none of them
had tried to get money from their own fathers.
Every now and then the fellows tried to learn to smoke, and that was a
thing that Pony's father would not let him do. He would let him smoke
the drift-wood twigs, which the boys picked up along the river shore
and called smoke-wood, or he would let him smoke grapevine or the
pods of the catalpa, which were just like cigars, but he was mean about
real tobacco. Once, when he found a cigar in Pony's pocket, he threw it
into the fire, and said that if he ever knew him to have another he
would have a talk with him.
He was pretty bad about wanting Pony to weed his mother's
flower-beds and about going regularly to school, and always getting up
in time for school. To be sure, if a show or a circus came along, he
nearly always took Pony in, but then he was apt to take the girls, too,
and he did not like to have Pony go off with a crowd of boys, which
was the only way to go into a show; for if the fellows saw you with
your family, all dressed up, and maybe with your shoes on, they would
make fun of you the next time they caught you out.
He made Pony come in every night before nine o'clock, and even
Christmas Eve, or the night before Fourth of July, he would not let him
stay up the whole night. When he went to the city, as the boys
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