not think of any other boat that they could get, and they did not know
how Pony could reach the reservation without a canal-boat. That was the
reason why they had to give up the notion of his going to the Indians; and
if anybody had told them that the Indians were going to come to Pony they
would have said he was joking, or else crazy; but this was really what
happened. It happened a good while afterwards; so long afterwards that
they had about forgotten he ever meant to run off, and they had got done
talking about it.

VI

HOW THE INDIANS CAME TO THE
BOY'S TOWN AND JIM LEONARD
ACTED THE COWARD

Jim Leonard was so mad because he lost his chip-hat in the canal basin,
when he fell off the boat (and had to go home bareheaded and tell his
mother all about what happened, though his clothes were dry enough, and he
might have got off without her noticing anything, if it had not been for
his hat) that he would not take any interest in Pony. But he kept on
taking an interest in Indians, and he was the most excited fellow in the
whole Boy's Town when the Indians came.

The way they came to town was this: The white people around the
reservation got tired of having them there, or else they wanted their
land, and the government thought it might as well move them out West,
where there were more Indians, there were such a very few of them on the
reservation; and so it loaded them on three canal-boats and brought them
down through the Boy's Town to the Ohio River, and put them on a
steamboat, and then took them down to the Mississippi, and put them on a
reservation beyond that river.

The boys did not know anything about this, and they would not have cared
much if they had. All they knew was that one morning (and it happened to
be Saturday) three canal-boats, full of Indians, came into the basin.
Nobody ever knew which boy saw them first. It seemed as if all the fellows
in the Boy's Town happened to be up at the basin at once, and were
standing there when the boats came in. When they saw that they were real
Indians, in blankets, with bows and arrows, warriors, squaws, papooses,
and everything, they almost went crazy, and when a good many of the
Indians came ashore and went over to the court-house yard and began to
shoot at quarters and half-dollars that the people stuck into the ground
for them to shoot at, the fellows could hardly believe their eyes. They
yelled and cheered and tried to get acquainted with the Indian b