The Flight of Pony Baker

Nine-year-old Frank Baker answers to Pony, a nickname the boys gave him so nobody would mix him up with his tall, freckled cousin of the same name. He has grievances. His mother keeps his shoes on him half the summer and dresses him better than any boy should be dressed, and his father backs the schoolteacher instead of him. So he decides to run off. Jim Leonard, the friend his mother cannot stand, works out the plans: a canal-boat north to the Indian reservation, later a raft down the river. The circus is Pony’s own idea. None of it goes the way he pictures. Howells subtitled the book A Boy’s Town Story and set it in the southern Ohio of fifty years earlier, the same ground as his 1890 boyhood memoir. Boyhood here is small humiliations, bragging, and loyalty misplaced.