Read Ebook: Andy the Acrobat Or Out with the Greatest Show on Earth by Harkness Peter T

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Ebook has 2041 lines and 47526 words, and 41 pages

"Mr. Darrow, I guess I would rather take the whipping."

"Too late," pronounced the relentless schoolmaster in icy tones.

And then, as Andy reached the door amid the gruesome silence and awe of his sympathetic comrades, Mr. Darrow added the final dreadful words:

"You are expelled."

HOOP-LA!

Andy Wildwood passed out of the village schoolhouse an anxious and desolate boy.

The brightest of sunshine gilded the spires and steeples of the village. It flooded highway and meadows with rich yellow light, but Andy, swinging his school books over his shoulder, walked on with drooping head and a cheerless heart.

"It's pretty bad, it's just the very worst!" he said with a deep sigh, as he reached a stile and sat down a-straddle of it.

Andy tossed his books up into the hollow of a familiar oak near at hand. Then he fell to serious thinking.

His gaze roving over the landscape, lit on the farmhouse of Jabez Dale. It revived the recent allusion of the old schoolmaster.

"I didn't steal that calf," declared Andy, straightening up indignantly. "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 a clown could cover in a given time on a handspring basis. He had shocked the schoolmaster by handing in an essay on "The Art of Bareback Riding."

Andy had tried every acrobatic trick he had seen depicted in the glowing advance sheets announcing the circus. To repeated efforts in this direction his admiring schoolmates had continually incited him.

He had tried the double somersault in the schoolroom that morning. Andy had made a famous success of the experiment, but with the direful result of smashing a desk, and subsequent expulsion.

Thinking over all this, Andy realized that the beginning and end of all his troubles was his irrepressible tendency towards acrobatic performances.

"And I simply can't help it!" he cried in a kind of reckless despair. "It's born in me, I guess. Oh, don't I hope Aunt Lavinia turns me out, as she has often threatened to do. Say, if she only would, and I could join some show, and travel and see things and--live!"

Andy threw himself flat on the green sward. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to a rapture of thought.

Gay banners, brightly comparisoned horses, white wildernesses of circus tents, tinselled clowns, royal ringmasters, joyful strains of music floated through his active brain. It was a day dream of rare beauty, and he could not tear himself away from it.

An idle hour went by before Andy realized it. As echoing voices rang out on the quiet air, he got to his feet rubbing his eyes as if they were dazzled.

"Recess already," Andy said. "Well, I'll lay low until it's over. I don't want to meet the boys just now. Then I'll do some more thinking. I suppose I've got to decide to go home. Ugh! but I hate to--and I just won't until the very last moment."

Andy went in among the shrubbery farther away from the road, but he could not hide himself. An active urchin discovered him from a distance. He yelled out riotously to his comrades, and they all came trooping along pell-mell in Andy's direction.

Their expelled schoolmate and favorite greeted them with a genial smile, never showing the white feather in the least.

His chums found him carelessly tossing half-a-dozen crab apples from hand to hand. Andy was an adept in "the glass ball act." He described rapid semicircles, festoons and double crosses. He shot the green objects up into the air in all directions, and went through the performance without a break.

"Isn't Andy a crackerjack?" gloated enthusiastic little Tod Smith. "Oh, say, Andy, you won't disappoint us now, will you?"

"What about?" inquired Andy.

"The rest of it."

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