Andy the Acrobat | Page 3

"Graham, who boards over at Millville, told us boys how Dale had sold a cow to a farmer there. He said they took her away from her calf, and the poor thing refused to eat. She just paced up and down a pasture fence from morning till night, crying for her calf. We got the calf, and carried it to its mother. I'll never forget the sight, and I'll never regret it, either--and what's best, the man who had got the cow was so worked up over its almost human grief, that he paid Dale for the calf, too, and kept it."
The memory of the incident brightened up Andy momentarily. Then, his glance flitting to the distant roof of a small neat cottage in a pretty grove of cedars, his face fell again. He choked on a great lump in his throat.
"Ginger!" he whistled dolefully, "how can I ever face the music over there!"
The cottage was Andy's home, but the thought had no charm or sweetness for the lone orphan boy whom its roof had grudgingly sheltered for the past five years.
Once it had belonged to his father. He had died when Andy was ten years old. Then it had passed into the legal possession of Mr. Wildwood's half-sister, Miss Lavinia Talcott.
This aunt was Andy's nearest relative. He had lived with her since his father's death, if it could be called living.
Miss Lavinia's favorite topic was the sure visitation of the sins of the father upon his children.
She was of a sour, snappy disposition. Her prim boast and pride was that she was a strict disciplinarian.
To a lad of Andy's free and easy nature, her rules and regulations were torture and an abomination.
She made him take off his muddy shoes in the woodshed. Woe to him if he ever brought a splinter of whittling, or a fragment of nutshell, into the distressingly neat kitchen!
Only one day in the week--Sunday--was Andy allowed the honor of sitting in the best room.
Then, for six mortal hours his aching limbs were glued to a straight-backed chair. There, in parlor state, he sat listening to the prim old maid's reading religious works, or some scientific lecture, or a dreary dissertation on good behavior.
She never allowed a schoolmate to visit him, even in the well-kept yard. She restricted his hours of play. And all the time never gave him a loving word or caress.
On the contrary, many times a week Miss Lavinia administered a tongue-lashing that suggested perpetual motion.
Mr. Wildwood had been something of an inventor. He had gotten up a hoisting derrick that was very clever. It brought him some money. This he sunk in an impossible balloon, crippled himself in the initial voyage of his airship, and died shortly afterwards of a broken heart.
Andy's mother had died when he was an infant. Thus it was that he fell into the charge of his unloving aunt.
It seemed that the latter had loaned Mr. Wildwood some money for his scientific experiments. As repayment, when he died, she took the cottage and what else was left of the wreck of his former fortune.
Even this she claimed did not pay her up in full, and she made poor Andy feel all the time that he was eating the bread of charity.
Andy's grandfather had been a famous sailor. Andy had read an old private account among his father's papers of a momentous voyage his grandfather had made to the Antarctic circle.
He loved to picture his ancestor among the ship's rigging. He had an additional enthusiasm in another description of his father's balloon venture.
Andy wished he had been born to fly. He seemed to have inherited a sort of natural acrobatic tendency. At ten years of age he was the best boy runner and jumper in the village.
The first circus he had seen--not with Miss Lavinia's permission--set Andy fairly wild, and later astonished his playmates with prodigious feats of walking on a barrel, somersaulting, vaulting with a pole, and numerous other amateur gymnastic attainments.
For the past month a circus, now exhibiting in a neighboring town, had been advertised in glowing prose and lurid pictures on big billboards all over the county.
Juvenile Fairview was set on fire anew with the circus fever. Andy's rope-walking feat and double somersault act from desk to desk that morning had resulted, getting him into the trouble of his life. It furthermore had interrupted other performances on the programme listed for later on that very day.
Andy's head had been full of the circus since he had seen its first poster at a cross-roads. He could never pass a heap of sawdust without cutting a caper.
In the spelling contest, he had stupefied his fellow students by nimbly rattling over such words as "megatherian," "stupendous," "zoological aggregation," and the like.
One of his sums covered the number of yards