him once, and she gave them
waffles for breakfast. She showed herself something like a mother, and she
had told him that if he would be very, very good she would get his father
to give him a quarter, so that he could buy two packs of
shooting-crackers, as well as five cents' worth of powder for the Fourth.
But she put her arms around him and hugged him up to her and kissed his
head and said:

"You'll be very careful, Pony, won't you? You're all the little boy we've
got, and if anything should happen to you--"

She seemed to be almost crying, and Pony laughed and said: "Why, nothing
could happen to you with shooting-crackers"; and she could have the powder
to keep for him; and he would just make a snake with it Fourth of July
night; put it around through the grass, loose, and then light one end of
it, and she would see how it would go off and not make the least noise.
But she said she did not want to see it; only he must be careful; and she
kissed him again and let him go, and when he got away he could see her
wiping her eyes. It seemed to him that she was crying a good deal in those
days, and he could not understand what it was about. She was scared at any
little thing, and would whoop at the least noise, and when his father
would say: "Lucy, my dear girl!" she would burst out crying and say that
she could not help it. But she got better and better to Pony all the time,
and it was this that now made him ashamed with Jim Leonard, because it
made him not want to run off so much.

He dug his toe into the turf in the court-house yard under the
locust-tree, and did not say anything till Jim Leonard asked him if he was
afraid to go off and live with the Indians, because if he was going to be
a cowardy-calf like that, it was all that Jim Leonard wanted to do with
him.

Pony denied that he was afraid, but he said that he did not know how to
talk Indian, and he did not see how he was going to get along without.

Jim Leonard laughed and said if that was all, he need not be anxious. "The
Indians don't talk at all, hardly, even among each other. They just make
signs; didn't you know that? If you want something to eat you point to
your mouth and chew; and if you want a drink, you open your mouth and keep
swallowing. When you want to go to sleep you shut your eyes and lean your
cheek over on your hand, this way. That's all the signs you need to begin
with, and you'll soon learn the rest. Now, say, are you going with the
Indians