PLANNED FOR PONY
BAKER TO RUN OFF ON A RAFT

Now we have got to go back to Pony Baker again. The summer went along till
it got to be September, and the fellows were beginning to talk about when
school would take up. It was almost too cold to go in swimming; that is,
the air made you shiver when you came out, and before you got your clothes
on; but if you stood in the water up to your chin, it seemed warmer than
it did on the hottest days of summer. Only now you did not want to go in
more than once a day, instead of four or five times. The fellows were
gathering chinquapin acorns most of the time, and some of them were
getting ready to make wagons to gather walnuts in. Once they went out to
the woods for pawpaws, and found about a bushel; they put them in
cornmeal to grow, but they were so green that they only got rotten. The
boys found an old shanty in the woods where the farmer made sugar in the
spring, and some of the big fellows said they were coming out to sleep in
it, the first night they got.

It was this that put Jim Leonard in mind of Pony's running off again. All
the way home he kept talking to Pony about it, and Pony said he was going
to do it yet, some time, but when Jim Leonard wanted him to tell the time,
he would only say, "You'll see," and wag his head.

Then Jim Leonard mocked him and dared him to tell, and asked him if he
would take a dare. After that he made up with him, and said if Pony would
run off he would run off, too; and that the way for them to do would be to
take the boards of that shanty in the woods and build a raft. They could
do it easily, because the boards were just leaned up against the
ridge-pole, and they could tie them together with pawpaw switches, they
were so tough, and then some night carry the raft to the river, after the
water got high in the fall, and float down on it to the city.

"Why, does the river go past the city?" Pony asked.

"Of course it does," said Jim Leonard, and he laughed at Pony. "It runs
into the Ohio there. Where's your geography?"

Pony was ashamed to say that he did not suppose that geography had
anything to do with the river at the Boy's Town, for it was not down on
the map, like Behring Straits and the Isthmus of Suez. But he saw that Jim
Leonard really knew something. He did not see the sense of carrying the
raft two miles through the woods when you could get plenty of drift-wood
on the river shore to make a raft of. But he did not like to say it