lieve he could
walk on account of the pain that seemed to curl him right up. He asked Jim
if he believed he was beginning to have the ague, but Jim said it was more
like the yellow janders, although he agreed that Pony had better go home,
for it was pretty late, anyway.

He made Pony promise that if he would take him home he would let him get
a good way off before he went into the house, so that Pony's father and
mother should not see who had brought him. He said that when he had got
off far enough he would hollo, and then Pony could go in. He was
first-rate to Pony on the way home, and helped him to walk, and when the
pain curled him up so tight that he could not touch his foot to the
ground, Jim carried him.

Pony could never know just what to make of Jim Leonard. Sometimes he
was so good to you that you could not help thinking he was one of the
cleverest fellows in town, and then all of a sudden he would do something
mean. He acted the perfect coward at times, and at other times he was not
afraid of anything. Almost any of the fellows could whip him, but once he
went into an empty house that was haunted, and came and looked out of the
garret windows, and dared any of them to come up.

He offered now, if Pony did not want to go home and let his folks find out
about the melon patch, to take him to his mother's log-barn, and get a
witch-doctor to come and tend him; but Pony said that he thought they had
better keep on, and then Jim trotted and asked him if the jolting did not
do him some good. He said he just wished there was an Indian medicine-man
around somewhere.

They were so long getting to Pony's house that it was almost dusk when
they reached the back of the barn, and Jim put him over the fence. Jim
started to run, and Pony waited till he got out of sight and holloed; then
he began to shout, "Father! Mother! _O_ mother! Come out here! I'm sick!"

It did not seem hardly a second till he heard his mother calling back:
"Pony! Pony! Where are you, child? Where are you?"

"Here, behind the barn!" he answered.

Pony's mother came running out, and then his father, and when they had put
him into his own bed up-stairs, his mother made his father go for the
doctor. While his father was gone, his mother got the whole story out of
Pony--what he had been doing all day, and what he had been eating--but as
to who had got him into the trouble, she said she knew from the start it
must be Jim Leonard.

After the doctor ca