any rat, and a good many people said
there never was any rat on the roof with Jim Leonard; they said that he
just made the rat up.

He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Baker
that he did not think of it at first, he was so excited.

Pony asked his father what he thought, and Pony's father said that it
might have been the kind of rat that people see when they have been
drinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he had signed
the temperance pledge.

But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonard
standing safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular election
cheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They all
agreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to his
mother, for he had saved Jim's life, and he ought to have the credit of
it.

Before this, and while everybody supposed that Jim Leonard would surely be
drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother's cabin to prepare
her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, and she kept
round getting breakfast, with her old clay pipe in her mouth; but when she
got it through her head, she made an awful face, and dropped her pipe on
the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw her check apron over her
head and sat down and cried.

[Illustration: "'I'LL LEARN THAT LIMB TO SLEEP IN A COW-BARN!'"]

But it took so long for her to come to this that the people had not got
over comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all for
the best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim's
shoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them.

Jim's mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw that
Jim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that made him
slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife, and she
came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker.

She said, "I'll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he's got a
decent bed in the house!" and then she started to come towards Jim
Leonard.

IV

THE SCRAPE THAT JIM LEONARD
GOT THE BOYS INTO

As I said, it was in the spring that Jim Leonard's hair-breadth escape
happened. But it was late in the summer of that very same year that he got
Pony Baker and all the rest of the boys into about one of the worst
scrapes that the Boy's Town boys were ever in.

At first, it was more l