; 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 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