Derrick Sterling: A Story of the Mines

In the burning breaker.
Fire! Fire in the breaker! Oh, the boys! the poor boys! These cries, and many like them—wild, heartrending, and full of fear—were heard on all sides. They served to empty the houses, and the one street of the little mining village of Raven Brook was quickly filled with excited people.
It was late in the afternoon of a hot summer's day, and the white-faced miners of the night shift were just leaving their homes. Some of them, with lunch-pails and water-cans slung over their shoulders by light iron chains, were gathered about the mouth of the slope, prepared to descend into the dark underground depths where they toiled. The wives of the day shift men, some of whom, black as negroes with coal-dust, powder-smoke, and soot, had already been drawn up the long slope, were busy preparing supper. From the mountainous piles of refuse, of culm, barefooted children, nearly as black as their miner fathers, were tramping homeward with burdens of coal that they had gleaned from the waste. High above the village, sharply outlined against the western sky, towered the huge, black bulk of the breaker.
Among these breaker boys two were particularly noticeable, although they were just as black and grimy as the others, and were doing exactly the same work. The elder of these, Derrick Sterling, was a manly-looking fellow, whose face, in spite of its coating of coal-dust, expressed energy, determination, and a quicker intelligence than that of any of his young companions. He was the only son of Gilbert Sterling, who had been one of the mining engineers connected with the Raven Brook Colliery. The father had been disabled by an accident in the mines, and after lingering for more than a year, had died a few months before the date of this 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.