The Flight of Pony Baker | Page 9

the way, and the roof
was shingled.
Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was loose
clap-boards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs in
the early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, in the
country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, and you
had to take Jim Leonard's word for it if you wanted to believe it. The
little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterwards it was a good
thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he had his
hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not have cared
if it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his mother had
whipped him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it.
He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to land when
they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would have
been just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right across
the river to Delorac's Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely he

could, but Hen Billard said:
"Well, why didn't you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?"
Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them
thought he could have done it if he could have got into the eddy that
there was over by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he
could have camped out and lived on fish till the river fell.
It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which
always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember.
The country above the Boy's Town was under water, for miles and
miles. The river bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all
planted over again when the water went down. The freshet tore away
pieces of orchard, and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with
logs and fence rails and chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and
horses. There was a dog chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling
awfully; the boys would have given anything if they could have saved
him, but the yellow river whirled him out of sight behind the middle
pier of the bridge, which everybody was watching from the bank,
expecting it to go any minute. The water was up within four or five feet
of the bridge, and the boys believed that if a good big log had come
along and hit it, the bridge would have been knocked loose from its
piers and carried down the river.
Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys all ran to watch it
as soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper.
After supper some of their mothers let them come back and stay till
bedtime, if they would promise to keep a full yard back from the edge
of the bank. They could not be sure just how much a yard was, and they
nearly all sat down on the edge and let their legs hang over.
Jim Leonard was there, holloing and running up and down the bank,
and showing the other boys things away out in the river that nobody
else could see; he said he saw a man out there. He had not been to
supper, and he had not been to school all day, which might have been
the reason why he would rather stay with the men and watch the bridge
than go home to supper; his mother would have been waiting for him

with a sucker from the pear-tree. He told the boys that while they were
gone he went out with one of the men on the bridge as far as the middle
pier, and it shook like a leaf; he showed with his hand how it shook.
Jim Leonard was a fellow who believed he did all kinds of things that
he would like to have done; and the big boys just laughed. That made
Jim Leonard mad, and he said that as soon as the bridge began to go, he
was going to run out on it and go with it; and then they would see
whether he was a liar or not! They mocked him and danced round him
till he cried. But Pony Baker, who had come with his father, believed
that Jim Leonard would really have done it; and at any rate, he felt
sorry for him when Jim cried.
He stayed later than any of the little fellows, because his father was
with him, and even all the big boys had gone home except