CHAPTER I
TOMMY REMINGTON FINDS A CIRCUS POSTER
Lessons were ended for the day, and an unwonted noise and bustle filled the little school-house as the children caught up their books and hats, eager to breathe again the fresh air with the keen scent of the woods in it, to revel in the bright sunshine bathing hill and valley.
“Good-by, Miss Bessie.”
“Good-by, dear.”
Three or four of the girls had lingered for the parting greeting, and then they, too, hurried away, while Miss Andrews stood in the school-house door and looked after the little figures as they tripped down the narrow path toward the group of coal-grimed houses which made the town of Wentworth, and she sighed unconsciously as they passed from sight behind an ugly pile of slack. It was not a pretty scene, this part along the river which man had made, with its crazy coal-tipples, its rows of dirty little cabins, its lines of coke-ovens, and the grime of coal-dust over everything.
How different was that part of nature’s handiwork which had been left unmarred! Mountain after mountain, clothed in green to the very summit, towered up from the narrow valley where New River picked its difficult way along, over great boulders and past beetling cliffs. How many centuries had it taken the little stream to cut for itself this pathway through the very heart of the Alleghanies! With what exhaustless patience had it gone about the task, washing away a bit of earth here, undermining a great rock there, banking up yonder behind some mountain wall which it could not get around, until it overtopped it and began the work of eating it away—so had it labored on, never wearying, never resting, never growing discouraged, seeking always the easiest way around the mountain-foot, but when no such way could be found, attacking the great wall before it with undaunted courage, singing at its work and splashing brightly in the sunshine—until at last it had conquered, as such perseverance always must, and springing clear of the hills, dashed joyously away across the level plains which would lead it to the sea.
And all this labor had not been in vain, for nature’s work had rendered man’s much easier when the time came to build a railroad over these mountains in order that the great wealth of coal and iron and other minerals which lay buried under them might be brought forth and so become of value to the world. The engineers who were sent forward to find a way for the road soon saw that the New River valley had been placed there, as it were, by Providence, for this very purpose, and when the road was built, it did not attempt to go straight forward, as railroads always like to do, but crept patiently along the river’s edge, following every winding, until the mountains were left behind. And the great men who built the road were very thankful for this little stream’s assistance.
It was not at the mountains nor at the river that Bessie Andrews looked, but at the grimy cabins of the miners, scattered along the hillside, and she thought with a sigh how little successful she had been in winning the hearts of their occupants. She had come from Richmond in a flush of happiness at her good fortune in getting the school, and determined to make a success of it, but she found it “uphill work” indeed.
Her story was that of so many other Southern girls coming of families old and one time wealthy, but ruined by the Civil War. The father, who had gone forth to battle in the strength of his young manhood, left his right arm on the bloody field at Gettysburg, and came home, at last, to find himself quite ruined. He could get no laborers to cultivate his fields, rank with the weeds of four years’ neglect; his stock had been seized by one or other of the armies, for both had fought back and forth across his land, with a necessity of need that knew no law; his people had been freed, and, excepting two or three of the older house-servants who had grown gray in the family’s service, had drifted away no one knew whither. For three years he struggled to bring order out of this desolation, but the task was greater than his strength. So the plantation was sold for a mere fraction of its worth before the war, and the family had moved to Richmond, in the hope that life there would be easier. There, ten years after the city fell before Grant’s army, Bessie Andrews was born; and there, some twelve years later, her father died, gray before his time, bowed down with care, so broken by his grim battle with the world that disease found him an easy victim.
So Bessie Andrews had never known the luxury and kindliness and easy hospitality of the old plantation life, but its influences and traditions lived still in her blood. She was a gentlewoman, with all a gentlewoman’s shrinking from the tragic and sordid and mean things in life; so it was only after a struggle with herself, as well as with her widowed mother, that she had ventured forth into the world to attempt to add something to the scanty income left them by her father. She had been educated with some care, at home for the most part, so she tried to secure a position as teacher in the public schools, deciding that it was this she was best fitted for; but there were no vacancies. Yet the superintendent, impressed by her earnestness, promised to keep her in mind, and one day sent for her.