Chapter 2

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."

"The rest of what?"

"Your show. You know you promised--"

"Oh, that's all off!" declared Andy gloomily. "I've made trouble enough already with my circus antics, I'm thinking."

"Don't you be mean now, Andy Wildwood!" broke in Ned Wilfer, a particular friend of the expelled boy. "Old Darrow has given us a double recess. We have a good forty minutes to have fun in. Come on."

The speaker seized Andy's reluctant arm and began pulling him towards the road.

"Got the horse?" he asked of a companion.

"Sure," eagerly nodded the lad addressed. "I got him fixed up, platform, blanket and all, before school. He's tied up, waiting, at the end of father's ten-acre lot."

"Yes, and I've got the hoop all ready there, too," chimed in Alf Warren, another schoolboy.

"See here, fellows," demurred Andy dubiously, "I haven't much heart for frolic. I'm expelled, you know, and there's Aunt Lavinia--"

"Forget it!" interrupted Ned. "That will all right itself."

Andy consented to accompany the gleeful, expectant throng. They had arranged the night before to hold an amateur circus exhibition "on their own hook."

One boy had agreed to provide the "fiery steed" for the occasion. Alf Warren was to be property man, and donate the blazing hoop.

They soon reached the corner of the ten-acre lot. There, tethered to a stake and grazing placidly, was a big-boned, patient-looking horse.

Across his back was strapped a small platform made of a cistern cover. This had been cushioned with a folded buggy robe.

Alf Warren dove excitedly into a clump of bushes. He reappeared triumphantly holding aloft a big hoop. It was wound round and round with strips of woolen cloth which exuded an unmistakable and unpleasant odor of kerosene.

"Say! it's going to be just like the circus picture on the side of the post office, isn't it?" chuckled little Tod Smith.

Ned Wilier took down the fence bars and led the horse out into the road.

Andy pulled off his coat and shoes. He stowed them alongside a rock near the fence. Then he produced some elastic bands and secured his trousers around the ankles.

His eyes brightened and he forgot all his troubles for the time being, as he ran back a bit.

"Out of the way there!" shouted Andy with glowing cheeks, posing for a forward dash.

He made a quick, superb bound and landed lightly on the horse's back.

Old Dobbin shied restively. Ned, at his nose, quieted him with a word.

Andy, the centre of an admiring group, tested the impromptu platform. He accepted a short riding whip handed up to him by Alf Warren with a truly professional flourish. Andy stood easy and erect, one hand on his hip. All that seemed lacking was the sawdust ring and a tinselled garb.

"Ready," announced Andy.

All of the group except Ned Wilfer started down the road in the wake of Alf Warren. The latter carried the hoop in one hand, some matches in the other.

The mob rounded the highway, purposely selected because it curved, and disappeared from view.

"Everything all right, Andy?" inquired Ned, strutting about with quite a ringmaster-like air.

"Yes, if the horse will go any."

"Oh, he'll get up full speed, once started," assured Ned.

It was fully five minutes before an expected signal reached them. From far around the bend in the road there suddenly echoed vivid shouts and whistlings.

"Start him up," ordered Andy.

Ned led the horse a few rods and got him to running. Then, dropping to the rear, he kept pace with the animal, slapping one flank and urging him up to greater speed.

He fell behind, but kept on running, as Andy, guiding the horse by the long bridle reins, occasionally gave him a stimulating touch of the light whip he carried.

Five hundred feet covered, old Dobbin seemed to enjoy the novelty of the occasion, and kept up a very fair gait.

Rounding the curve in the road and looking a quarter-of-a-mile ahead, Andy could see his schoolmates gathered around a tree stump surmounted by Alf Warren, holding the hoop aloft.

Just here, too, for the space of a mere minute Andy could view the schoolhouse through a break in the timber.

A swift side glance showed the big scholar, Graham, lounging in the doorway.

Just approaching him from the direction of the village was the old schoolmaster, Mr. Darrow.

"He has been up to see Aunt Lavinia, that's the reason of the double recess," thought Andy, his heart sinking a trifle. Then, flinging care to the winds for the occasion, he uttered a ringing:

"Hoop-la!"

Andy felt that he must do justice to the expectations of his young friends.

He swung outward on one foot in true circus ring fashion. He swayed back at the end of the bridles. He tipped thrillingly at the very edge of the cushioned platform. All the time by shouts and whip, he urged up old Dobbin to his best spurt of speed.

At the schoolhouse door Mr. Darrow gazed at the astonishing spectacle with uplifted hands.

"Shocking!" he groaned. "Graham, there goes the most incorrigible boy in Fairview."

"Yes," nodded Graham with a quaint smile, as Andy Wildwood flashed out of sight past the break in the timber--"he certainly is going some."

"He'll break his neck!"

"I trust not."