THROUGH THE SHADOWS WITH O. HENRY
BY
AL JENNINGS,
AUTHOR OF "BEATING BACK"
TO MY DEAR FRIEND FREMONT OLDER
EDITOR "SAN FRANCISCO CALL"
In giving this volume to the public I am indebted to you, without whose aid and encouragement the book would never have been written. To you again are due my thanks for furnishing the valued assistance of Elenore Meherin who greatly aided in the preparation of the manuscript.
Devotedly yours,
AL JENNINGS.
CHAPTER I.
A mother's flight; birth in a snowdrift; the drunken father's blow; the runaway boy; the fight in the shambles; abandoned on the prairie.
A wilderness of snow—wind tearing like a ruffian through the white silence—the bleak pines setting up a sudden roar—a woman and four children hurrying through the waste.
And abruptly the woman stumbling exhausted against a little fence corner, and the four children screaming in terror at the strange new calamity that had overtaken them.
The woman was my mother—the four children, the oldest eight, the youngest two, were my brothers. I was born in that fence corner in the snow in Tazwell County, Virginia, November 25, 1863. My brothers ran wildly through the Big Basin of Burke's Gardens, crying for help. My mother lay there in a fainting collapse from her five days' flight from the Tennessee plantation.
The Union soldiers were swooping down on our plantation. My father, John Jennings, was a colonel in the Confederate army. He sent a courier warning my mother to leave everything, to take the children and to cross the border into Virginia. The old home would be fired by the rebel soldiers to prevent occupation by Union troops.