the river and go in, before supper, anyway."

Nearly all the fellows agreed, and Old Hawkins said: "Come along, Pony!
You got to come, too!"

But Pony stiffly refused, partly because it seemed to him pretty mean to
forget all about his running away, like that, and partly because he had to
ask his mother before he went in swimming. A few of the little fellows
kept with him all the way home, but most of the big boys went along with
Old Hawkins.

One of them stayed with Pony and the little boys, and comforted him for
the way the rest had left him. He was a fellow who was always telling
about Indians, and he said that if Pony could get to the Indians,
anywhere, and they took a fancy to him, they would adopt him into their
tribe, if it was just after some old chief had lost a son in battle. Maybe
they would offer to kill him first, and they would have to hold a
council, but if they did adopt him, it would be the best thing, because
then he would soon turn into an Indian himself, and forget how to speak
English; and if ever the Indians had to give up their prisoners, and he
was brought back, and his father and mother came to pick him out, they
might know him by some mark or other, but he would not know them, and they
would have to let him go back to the Indians again. He said that was the
very best way, and the only way, but the trouble would be to get to the
Indians in the first place. He said he knew of one reservation in the
north part of the State, and he promised to find out if there were any
other Indians living nearer; the reservation was about a hundred miles
off, and it would take Pony a good while to go to them.

The name of this boy was Jim Leonard. But now, before I go the least bit
further with the story of Pony Baker's running away, I have got to tell
about Jim Leonard, and what kind of boy he was, and the scrape that he
once got Pony and the other boys into, and a hair-breadth escape he had
himself, when he came pretty near being drowned in a freshet; and I will
begin with the hair-breadth escape, because it happened before the
scrape.

III

JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

Jim Leonard's stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on a
rise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard's log-cabin. The boys called it
Jim Leonard's log-cabin, but it was really his mother's, and the stable
was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable began the logs
stopped, and it was weather-boar