Derrick Sterling | Page 2

story, leaving a wife and two children, Derrick and little Helen.
For nearly five years before his father's death Derrick had attended a boarding-school near Philadelphia; but the sad event made a vast difference in his prospects for life, and compelled his return to the colliery village that he called home.
Mr. Sterling had always lived up to his moderate income, and though his salary was continued to the time of his death, the family then found themselves confronted by extreme poverty. They owned their little vine-covered cottage, at one end of the straggling village street, and in this Mrs. Sterling began to take boarders, with the hope of thus supporting her children. Her struggle was a hard one, and when one of the boarders, who was superintendent of the breaker, or "breaker boss," offered Derrick employment in his department, the boy was so anxious to help his mother that he gladly accepted the offer. Nothing else seemed open to him, and anything was better than idleness. So, after winning a reluctant consent from his mother, Derrick began to earn thirty-five cents a day, at that hardest and most monotonous of all forms of youthful labor, picking slate in a coal-breaker.
He had been brought up and educated so differently from any of his companions of the chutes that the life was infinitely harder for him than for them. He hated dirt, and loved to be nice and clean, which nobody could be for a minute in the breaker. He also loved the sunlight, the fields, and the woods; but no sunshine ever penetrated the thick dust-clouds within these walls. In the summer-time it shone fierce and hot on the long sloping roof, just above the boys' heads, until the interior was like an oven, and in winter they were chilled by the cold winds that blew in through the ever-open windows.
Here, and under these conditions, Derrick must work from seven o'clock in the morning until six in the evening. At noon the boys were allowed forty minutes in which to eat the luncheons brought in their little tin pails, and draw a few breaths of fresh air. During the first few weeks of this life there were times when it seemed to Derrick that he could not bear it any longer. More than once, as he sat beside the rattling chute, mechanically sorting the never-ending stream, with hands cut and bruised by the sharp slate, great tears rolled down his grimy cheeks. Over and over again had he been tempted to rush from the breaker, never to return to it; but each time he had seemed to see the patient face of his hard-working mother, or to feel the clinging arms of little Helen about his neck. He would remember how they were depending on his two dollars a week, and, instead of running away, would turn again to his work with a new energy, determined that, since he was to be a breaker boy, he would be the best in the colliery.
In this he had succeeded so well as to win praise, even from Mr. Guffy, the breaker boss, who usually had nothing but harsh words and blows for the boys who came under his rule. He had also been noticed by the superintendent of the colliery, and promised a place in the mine as soon as a vacancy should occur that he could fill. In the breaker he had been promoted from one seat to another, until for several weeks past he had occupied the very last one on the line of his chute. Here he gave the coal its final inspection before it shot down into the bins, from which it was loaded into cars waiting to carry it to cities hundreds of miles away. Above all, Derrick was now receiving the highest wages paid to breaker boys, and was able to hand his mother three big silver dollars every Saturday night.
The first time he did this seemed to him the proudest moment of his life, for, as she kissed him, his mother said that this sum was sufficient to pay all his expenses, that he was now actually supporting himself, and was therefore as independent as any man in the colliery.
It was a wonderful help to him, during the last few weeks of his breaker boy life, to think over these words and to realize that by his own efforts he had become a self-supporting member of society. It really seemed as though he increased in stature twice as fast after that little talk with his mother. At the same time his clothes appeared to shrink from the responsibility of covering an independent man, instead of the boy for whom they had originally been intended.
Beside Derrick Sterling, that hot summer afternoon, sat Paul Evert, a slender, delicate boy