Summary
A porcelain-skinned gamine named Bab Fanning—her eyes two candle-flames of yearning—haunts the sooty alleyways of an East-Coast mill town, desperate for the phantom rib-cage of a brother she has never had. Into her orbit drifts Tom Wellsley, a runaway baronial heir whose silk cravat still smells of mahogany libraries and punitive silences; he trades silver buttons for a newsboy’s cap, craving the bruise of liberty. The cobblestone fraternity of pint-sized headline-hawkers, smelling sulfur and envy, stitch contraband peaches into his threadbare coat, sending him shackled to a House of Correction whose walls perspire vinegar and despair. Bab’s lisping petitions to magistrates ricochet off iron doors, so Tom bolts into the night alongside a hydra of juvenile delinquents who plot to sack the very manse he fled. Repelled by their molten greed, Tom instead stoops behind a scythe in the lambent fields of a tenant farm, while Bab—pigtails unbraided by wind—tramps to the Wellsley manor, a mausoleum of chandeliers and unspoken apologies. There, the pint-sized outlaw-gang strong-arms her through a sash-window; once inside, she forgets burglary and befriends Tom’s granite-jawed father, a widower whose grief tastes of cedar and old ledgers. Together, the iron magnate and the scrap-of-moonlight girl track the furrowed earth until Tom is discovered, sunburned and contrite, and is lured homeward by a duet of voices—one baritone, one bell-bright—promising that kinship can be chosen, not merely begotten.
Synopsis
Little Bab Fanning, who has always wanted a brother, befriends young Tom Wellsley, who has run away from his wealthy but stern father, Daniel Wellsley, in search of adventure. Tom becomes a newsboy, but the other "newsies," resentful of the wealthy boy's intrusion, plant some stolen fruit in his pockets, and he is sent to the House of Correction. Bab's effort to secure his release proves unsuccessful, and he escapes with a gang of tough boys who subsequently decide to rob his father's house. Refusing to join them, Tom finds work on a farm. Meanwhile, Bab, in search of her friend, goes to the Wellsley home, where she is forced by the boy crooks to break in. Inside, she forgets the gang and befriends Tom's brooding father, and together they find Tom and convince him to return home.
