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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Madigans, by Miriam Michelson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Madigans
+
+Author: Miriam Michelson
+
+Illustrator: Orson Lowell
+
+Release Date: April 27, 2007 [EBook #21243]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MADIGANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by V. L. Simpson and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    [Illustration:
+      A Few of Irene's "Fathers"]
+
+
+THE MADIGANS
+BY
+MIRIAM MICHELSON
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE"
+
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
+BY ORSON LOWELL
+
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+THE CENTURY CO.
+1904
+
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1904, by
+The Century Co.
+
+_Published October, 1904_
+
+The DeVinne Press
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                          PAGE
+
+Cecilia the Pharisee         3
+
+A Pagan and a Puritan       39
+
+A Merry, Merry Zingara      79
+
+The Shut-Ups               115
+
+The Ancestry of Irene      147
+
+The Last Straw             189
+
+A Ready Letter-Writer      219
+
+"The Martyrdom of Man"     265
+
+Kate: A Pretense           297
+
+Old Mother Gibson          331
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                        PAGE
+A Few of Irene's "Fathers"                          _Frontispiece_
+
+"That settles Number 10," said Sissy, grimly               7
+
+Left the room with such uncompromising hauteur
+... that her aunt again exploded                          13
+
+"Please, Mr. Garvan," she said                            17
+
+Some of the Madigans                                      23
+
+The Rest of the Madigans                                  29
+
+Seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed         35
+
+"Play it, then, you mean thing," she cried, ... "if
+it's going to do you any good!"                           47
+
+"Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman,"
+bullied Mrs. Pemberton                                    53
+
+Of the design and construction of which he was quite
+vain                                                      63
+
+The Belle of the Afternoon                                71
+
+She was pronounced a "regular little love" by the
+Misses Bryne-Stivers                                      91
+
+"I don't see how you're going to dance in them"           95
+
+"But is she _very_ sick?"                                101
+
+She glanced up the incline of the see-saw to the height
+whence Irene looked down                                 153
+
+"I want you--come!" the Indian princess announced        163
+
+They had coasted only half a block                       169
+
+"Oh, you needn't glare at me!" exclaimed Bep             183
+
+A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In
+Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry          223
+
+Stamping ... in a frenzy                                 229
+
+Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled            237
+
+"Here would I rest," she chanted                         253
+
+She walked a step or two with him                        261
+
+
+
+
+THE MADIGANS
+
+
+
+
+CECILIA THE PHARISEE
+
+
+    I, Cecilia Morgan Madigan, being of sound mind and in
+    purfect bodily health, and residing in Virginia City,
+    Nevada, do hereby on this first day of April solemnly
+    promise:
+
+    1. That I will be Number 1 this next month at school.
+
+    2. That I will be pachient with Papa, and try to stand
+    him.
+
+    3. That I will set Bep--yes, and Fom too, even if she is
+    Irene's partner--a good example.
+
+    4. That I will not once this next month pinch Aunt
+    Anne's sensative plant--no matter what she does to me.
+
+    5. That I will dust the back legs of the piano even when
+    Mrs. Pemberton isn't expected.
+
+    6. That I will help Kate controll her temper, and not
+    mock and aggravate her when she sulks.
+
+    7. That I will be a little mother to Frank and teach her
+    to grow up and be a creddit to the famly.
+
+    8. That I will not steal candy out of Kate's
+    pocket--without first begging her very hard to give me
+    some.
+
+    9. That I will practice The Gazelle fathfully every
+    solatary day. And give up reading on the sly while I
+    play 5-finger exercises.
+
+    10. That I will try to bear with Irene. That I will do
+    all I can not to fight with her--but she is a selfish
+    devvil who is always in the wrong.
+
+    And all this I solemnly promise myself without being
+    coersed in any way, of my own free will, without let or
+    hidrance, because I want to be good.
+
+                 _Cecilia Morgan Madigan_ (_called Sissy_),
+                                     Aged 11 last birthday.
+
+    P.S. And I feel sure I can do it all, God helping me,
+    except Number 10--which is the hardest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sissy, who had been sitting writing only half dressed, folded the paper
+reverently, put it to her lips for lack of a seal, and then buttoned it
+firmly inside her corset waist.
+
+She felt so virtuous already that the carrying out of her intentions
+seemed really supererogatory. When she went to Irene to have her button
+her dress in the back, she had such a sensation of holiness, such a
+consciousness of a forbearing, pure, and gentle spirit, that her
+sister's malicious pretense of ignoring her presence appeared to her
+nothing less than sacrilege.
+
+"Ain't you going to button me, Split?" she demanded, indignant that her
+enemy, whom she was going to treat with Christ-like charity, should
+successfully try her temper before the ink was dry on her own promise to
+keep the peace.
+
+"Ask me pretty," grinned Split, whose nickname honored a gymnastic feat
+which no other Madigan, however athletic, could accomplish half so
+successfully as the second. "Say 'please.'"
+
+"I won't do anything of the sort. You know you've got to do it, and
+you've no right to expect me to say 'please' every time. You don't do it
+yourself, you hateful thing!"
+
+"Why don't you cry?"
+
+"Because I won't for you--because you can't make me--because--"
+
+"Because you are crying in spite of yourself! Because anybody can make
+you cry, cry-baby!"
+
+Sissy's hands flew up to her breast. It was a recognized gesture with
+her, a physical holding of herself together in the last minute that
+preceded her temperamental flying to pieces.
+
+Split retreated cautiously, clearing the deck herself for action.
+
+But no first gun was fired in that engagement. A crackling of the
+document hidden over the spot where she thought her heart was came like
+a warning note to Sissy. She struggled against it a moment; then her
+hands fell. Meekly she turned her back upon her tormentor, and in a
+voice of such exquisite holiness as to be almost unearthly, she said:
+
+"Split dear, will you please button me?"
+
+A look of outraged astonishment at the unheard-of endearment came over
+Irene's face. The Madigans regarded demonstrative affection as pure
+affectation at its best; at its worst it was little short of indecent.
+
+"'Split dear?'" mocked Irene as soon as she recovered. "Yes, dear. Turn
+around, dear. Stand straight, dear. Wait a minute, dear--"
+
+Sissy stood in silence, biting her tongue that she might not speak. She
+was so occupied with the desire to keep Number 10 of her compact with
+herself that she did not notice how long it was before Irene really
+began to button her waist. She did note, though, that she began at the
+bottom, a proceeding Split fancied merely because it drove her junior
+nearly frantic. She buttoned with maddening slowness up to the middle,
+when she capriciously left this point and recommenced at the top.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'That settles Number 10,' said Sissy, grimly"]
+
+Mentally Sissy followed the operation. It was almost complete when
+through the little gap purposely left open Split deftly introduced a
+providentially flattened piece of ice from the window-sill, giving her
+victim a little shake that sent the ice slipping smoothly down her
+squirming body, but escaping before Sissy could turn and rend her.
+
+"That settles Number 10," said Sissy, grimly, to herself, while she
+danced with discomfort. "I'll kill her if I get a chance--that's what
+I'll do. I'll get even, or my name's not Sis Madigan."
+
+She hurried back into her room, which the twins shared, and stood in
+damp martyrdom while Bessie's butter-fingers crept with miserable
+slowness up and down. She suffered so from Bessie's ineptness that,
+despite the requirements of Number 3 of her code, she tore herself
+violently from her and turned her back imploringly to Florence. But Fom
+was a partizan of Split's, and it was against all the ethics of Madigan
+warfare to aid and comfort the enemy. When Sissy, chastened, returned to
+Bep's ministrations, the blonde one of the twins was so hurt and
+offended by the implication of awkwardness--a point upon which she was
+as vulnerable as she was sensitive--that Sissy slapped them both before
+she went at last for relief to Aunt Anne.
+
+This was fatal, as she knew it would be.
+
+"I shall tell your father about Irene," her aunt said, looking up from
+the coffee she was sipping as she lay in bed reading a French book. "But
+it's just as well, for I told you yesterday that that dress was too
+dirty to wear another day. Change it now--"
+
+"Oh, Aunt Anne, it's late already--"
+
+"You'll change that dress, Sissy, or you won't go to school."
+
+"I won't! It's too late. I'll be late. That means one credit off, and
+this month I'm going--" A remembrance of her lofty intentions came
+suddenly to Sissy. All the world seemed bent on compelling her to
+forswear herself.
+
+"Cecilia!" commanded Miss Madigan.
+
+Sissy stiffened.
+
+"You've disturbed my reading enough this morning. If you say another
+word I'll--"
+
+"Oh, Aunt Anne--"
+
+"Go over to the wall, Cecilia, and stand with your back to me for five
+minutes."
+
+With a fiendish light in her eye--a light of such desperate satisfaction
+as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved
+toward the sensitive-plant in the window.
+
+"Not there! That poor plant seems to suffer sympathetically with your
+badness. Stand over by the bureau."
+
+Sissy obeyed. Her rage at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage
+that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her
+knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into
+dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man
+might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been
+mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made
+commandments.
+
+She was standing with her nose pressed firmly against the green
+wall-paper, her back laid open as by a surgical operation, and a towel,
+which her aunt had forced into the aperture for drying purposes,
+dangling down behind, when Kate, passing the door on her way to
+breakfast, glanced in.
+
+Her sputtering, quickly stifled screech of laughter sent Sissy spinning
+about as a bull does when the banderilla is planted in his quivering
+flesh. She looked at the doorway; it was empty, but she heard scurrying
+footsteps without. Kate was on her way to tell the others.
+
+She looked at Aunt Anne. That severe lady had dropped her book and,
+seized by the contagion, was shaking with silent laughter.
+
+Not a word did Sissy say. Her expression of disgust,--disgust that a
+grown-up should be so silly as to see something funny in absolutely
+nothing; disgust that her aunt should so weaken the effect of her own
+discipline,--reinforced by the green smudge on her nose, rubbed off the
+wall-paper, finished Miss Madigan. The lady no longer attempted to
+conceal the disgraceful fact that she was laughing. She gave an audible
+gurgle, and began to wipe the tears of enjoyment from her eyes.
+
+In that moment the iron entered into Sissy Madigan's soul. She turned
+again to the wall, and taking a pin which had fastened the bow of ribbon
+at her throat, she pricked slowly but relentlessly in the loose
+wall-paper this legend:
+
+  AUNT ANNE--PIG
+
+After which she felt relieved, and, the five minutes being up, left the
+room with such uncompromising hauteur, still splashed with green on the
+nose, still split open down the back, with the towel's fringe dangling
+in dignity behind, that her aunt again exploded.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "Left the room with such uncompromising hauteur ... that
+       her aunt again exploded"]
+
+The fact that she had irretrievably lost one credit through tardiness
+set Sissy's lips in a tight line of determination to guard jealously
+every one of the ninety-and-nine left to her.
+
+At recess she remained at her desk studying her geography with an
+intensity of purpose that made her rivals' hearts quake. She sat at the
+teacher's desk--lifted to this almost regal eminence by his fondness for
+her petulant ways as well as because of that quality of leadership which
+made Sissy her fellows' spokeswoman. Hers was the privilege of using the
+master's pencils, sharpened to a fineness that made neatness a
+dissipation instead of a task. It was she, of course, who originated the
+decorative style of arithmetic-paper much in vogue, on which each
+example was penned off in an inclosure fenced by alternating vertical
+and horizontal double hyphens.
+
+But a queer, conscientious sense of the responsibilities of power and
+place modified Sissy's rapturous delight in her position, so that she
+kept it despite a fiercely jealous class-spirit developed by a strict
+credit-system, by the emulative temper which the rarefied atmosphere of
+the little mining town fostered, and by a young master just out of
+college who looked upon his teaching as a temporary adventure, much as
+a Japanese gentleman regards domestic service.
+
+It was in her capacity of class representative that the master had
+consulted Sissy upon the limits to be observed in the forthcoming public
+oral examination in geography. And she had enlightened him as to what
+would be considered quite "fair." This treaty, into which she entered
+with the seriousness of an ambassador to an unfriendly power arranging a
+settlement of a disputed question, had a character so sacred in her eyes
+that its violation by the master in the course of the afternoon came
+upon her like a blow.
+
+"Cecilia Madigan," asked the master, "what is the highest mountain in
+the world?"
+
+Sissy rose. The imposing array of visitors in school faded out of her
+horizon. All she could see was the eyes of her schoolmates turned in
+accusatory horror upon her. They suspected her of betraying them; of
+using her elevated position to hand down untrustworthy information.
+
+"Please, Mr. Garvan," she said in tones more of sorrow than of anger,
+skilfully showing her knowledge of the answer while denying his right to
+it, "that question isn't on the map of Africa."
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'Please, Mr. Garvan,' she said"]
+
+A flush of annoyance mounted to the young master's forehead. Out of the
+corner of her eye Sissy saw the preliminary twitch of the corners of his
+lips that served the class for a danger-signal.
+
+"What is the highest mountain, Cecilia?" he repeated sternly.
+
+Sissy stood a moment looking at him. All that she might not say--her
+contempt for pledge-breakers, her shocked hero-worship now forever a
+thing of the past, her outraged school-girl's affection--she shot
+straight at the master from her angry eyes.
+
+Then she sat down.
+
+"I don't know," she said.
+
+He looked up from his book, incredulous. Ten credits out of one hundred
+gone at one fell swoop--ten of Sissy Madigan's credits, for which she
+fought so gallantly and which she cherished so jealously when she once
+had them in her possession.
+
+"I--don't--know," repeated Sissy, disdainfully.
+
+The master passed the question. But as he put it to the next girl, Sissy
+put another question, with her eyes, to the same girl.
+
+"Are you a scab?" her steady gaze challenged. "Are you going to benefit
+by what a mate suffers for principle's sake? Are you a coward who
+doesn't dare to stand up for your class? And--do you know what you'll
+get from me if you are?"
+
+"I--don't--know," faltered the girl.
+
+A glory of triumph shot over Sissy's face. It leaped like a sunrise from
+peak to peak in a mountain-range of obstinacy. "I don't know"--"I don't
+know"--"I don't know"--the shibboleth of the strikers' cause went down
+the line. The master was shamed in public by the banner pupils of his
+school. He writhed, but he put the question steadily to every girl till
+he came to Irene, last in the line.
+
+"What is the highest mountain in the world?" he asked, perfunctorily
+now.
+
+But, to his amazement, she rose, and, looking out of the window up to
+the mountain to the skirts of which the town clung, she answered:
+
+"Mount Davidson."
+
+Sissy's savage joy followed so quickly upon her horror at her own
+sister's defection that the closing of school left her in a trembling
+storm of emotions. In the dressing-room, where the girls were putting on
+their hats, she marched up to Irene, followed by her wrathful adherents
+and feeling like an avenging Brutus.
+
+"You're a sneak, Split Madigan! You're a coward, and--and a stupid
+coward. You don't know enough to betray your class and get the benefit
+of it, but you'd rather be mean than get credits, anyway. Nobody can
+count on you. Changeable Silk, that's what you are--changing color all
+the time, never standing firm! I hate you! Changeable Silk! Changeable
+Silk!"
+
+"Changeable Silk! Changeable Silk!" chanted her following.
+
+The little dressing-room rang with the cry of the mob, so filled with
+significance by the tone in which it was uttered that Irene paled and
+shrank.
+
+But only for a moment. The Madigans never lacked courage long. That
+fierce internecine strife waged by the clan in the old house high on the
+side of the hill made a Madigan quick and resolute.
+
+"Stupid yourself, Sissy! My answer made him madder than your not
+answering."
+
+Sissy looked at her searchingly. "But--did you--" she wavered.
+
+"Of course I did! Who's the stupid now? Do you s'pose I didn't know it
+was--"
+
+"What?--what?" Sissy repeated as her sister hesitated.
+
+Irene turned up her nose insultingly. "I don't--know," she mocked, and
+beat a successful retreat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Francis Madigan dined in a long room, the only man at a table with seven
+women ranging in years from four to forty-four. The accumulation of
+girls in his family was so wanton an outrage upon his desires that he
+rather rejoiced in the completeness of the infliction as an undeniable
+grievance.
+
+He needed a grievance as a shield against which others' grievances might
+be shattered. And in default of a more tangible one, he cited his
+heavily be-daughtered house. It was at dinner-time that he always seemed
+to realize the extent of his disaster. As he took his place at the head,
+his wrathful eye swept from Frances in her high chair, up along the
+line, past the twins, through Cecilia, Irene, and Kate, till it lighted
+upon Miss Madigan's good-humored, placid face. His sister's placidity
+was an ever-present offense to the father of the Madigans,--the most
+irascible of unsuccessful men,--and the snort with which he finished the
+inspection and took up the carving-knife had become a classic in Madigan
+annals long before Sissy brought down the house at the age of eight by
+imitating it one evening in his absence.
+
+    [Illustration:
+       "Some of the Madigans"]
+
+But to-night a most painful and ostentatious respect marked Sissy's
+manner to her parent. She stood markedly,--while the others scrambled
+into their chairs and Wong, the Chinese servant, sped about placing
+everything on the table at once,--waiting for her father to be seated.
+
+She was still waiting politely when his eye lighted upon her. "Sit down,
+Cecilia!" he roared; "what d' ye want, gaping there?"
+
+Sissy sat down. So holy was she that she did not resent (openly) the
+low, delighted giggle Irene gave. She began to be politely attentive to
+Dusie, her father's pet canary, though she loathed the spoiled little
+thing that hopped about the table helping itself.
+
+Madigan had a way of telling himself, in his rare moments of
+introspection, that the tenderness he might have lavished upon a son he
+spent upon the male offspring of more fortunate genera than man. The big
+Newfoundland and the great cat came to meals regularly. They shared
+Madigan's affection with the birds (whose cage, big as a dog's house, he
+had himself nailed up against the side of the wall), that broke into a
+maddening din of song, excited by the rival clatter of young Madigans
+dining.
+
+Protected by this shrill symphony from the sound of his daughters'
+voices, Madigan fed his dog, his cat, and his favorite canary, and with
+his head upon one hand, in token of his abiding disgust with the human,
+daughterful world, ate quickly with the other.
+
+This pose was the signal that freed the feminine Madigan tongue. Usually
+they all broke into conversation at once; but on this evening there
+seemed to be some agreement which held them mute till Irene spoke.
+
+"I am glad to see you be so patient with papa, Sissy," she said gently.
+
+His third daughter glanced apprehensively at Madigan. But her father had
+retired within his shell, and nothing but a cataclysm could reach him
+there.
+
+"Why--" she said, puzzled, "why--I--"
+
+"Promise me that you'll try to stand him," urged Split, joyously.
+
+"And that you'll help me control my temper, and not mock and aggravate
+me when I sulk," chanted Kate.
+
+Sissy dropped her knife and fork, and her hands flew to her bosom, not
+in wrath, but in terror. The crackling testament was gone!
+
+"Split! You--"
+
+"Try to bear with me, won't you, Sis, even if I am a devil?" grinned
+Split.
+
+"And set us a good example, Sissy," piped the twins.
+
+Sissy gasped.
+
+"Be a yittle muvver to Fwank," lisped the baby, prompted by a big
+sister.
+
+"And don't steal candy out of my pocket, will you, Cecilia Morgan?"
+begged her oldest sister.
+
+"And--"
+
+Sissy sprang into the air, as though lifted bodily by the taunts of
+these ungrateful beneficiaries of her good intentions.
+
+"Sit down, you ox!" came in thundering tones from the head of the table.
+
+When one was called an ox among the Madigans the culprit invariably
+subsided, however the epithet might tend to make her sisters rejoice.
+But Sissy had borne too much in that one day--always keeping in mind the
+perfect sanctity with which she had begun it.
+
+With an inarticulate explanation that was at once a sob, a complaint,
+and a trembling defiance, she pushed back her chair and fled to her
+room. Here she sobbed in peace and plenty; sobbed till tears became a
+luxury to be produced by a conscious effort of the will. It had always
+been a grief to Sissy that she could never cry enough. Split, now, could
+weep vocally and by the hour, but all too soon for Sissy the wells of
+her own sorrow ran dry.
+
+Yet tears had ever a chastening effect upon the third of the Madigans.
+In due time she rose, washed her face, and combed back her hair and
+braided it in a tight plait that stuck out at an aggressive angle on the
+side; unaided she could never get it to depend properly from the middle.
+This heightened the feeling of utter peacefulness, of remorse washed
+clean, besides putting her upon such a spiritual elevation as enabled
+her to meet her world with composure, though bitter experience told her
+how long a joke lasted among the Madigans.
+
+She fell upon her knees at last beside her bed. No Madigan of this
+generation had been taught to pray, an aggressive skepticism--the
+tangent of excessive youthful religiosity--having made the girls' father
+an outspoken foe to religious exercise. But to Sissy's emotional,
+self-conscious soul the necessity for worded prayer came quick now and
+imperative.
+
+"O Lord," she pleaded aloud, "help me to keep 'em all--even Number
+10--in spite of Split and the devil. Help--"
+
+She heard the door open behind her.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "The Rest of the Madigans"]
+
+With a bound she was in bed, fully dressed as she was; and pulling the
+covers tight up to her neck, she waited, to all intents and purposes
+fast asleep.
+
+"You little fool!" said Madigan, with a hint of laughter in his heavy
+voice and laying a not ungentle hand on her blazing cheeks. "D' ye think
+I care if you want to kneel and kotow like other idiots? If you're that
+kind--and I suppose you are, being a woman--pray and be--blessed!"
+
+It was the nearest thing to a paternal benediction that had ever come to
+Sissy, but she was too wary a small actress to be moved by it out of her
+role. Nor did her father wait to note the effect of his words. His heavy
+step passed on and out of her room into his own, and the door slammed
+between them.
+
+In a moment Sissy was up; in another moment she had torn off her
+clothes, blown out her candle, and jumped back into bed. She was almost
+asleep when the twins came in, but she feigned the deepest of slumbers
+when Bessie pushed a crackling piece of paper under her pillow, though
+her fingers closed greedily about it as soon as the room was quiet
+again.
+
+She knew what it was--her precious compact with herself, that loyal
+little Bep had recaptured from the enemy. She lay there, lulled by its
+presence; and slowly, slowly she was dropping off into real slumber
+when a sharply agonizing thought, an inescapable mental pin-prick,
+roused her. It was Number 9. She had not touched the piano during the
+whole of that strenuous day.
+
+She withdrew her fingers reproachfully from the insistent reminder of
+virtuous intention, and resolutely she turned her back on it and tried
+to pretend herself to sleep. But every broken section of her treaty had
+a voice, and above them all clamored the call of Number 9 that it was
+not yet too late.
+
+When Sissy rose wearily at last and draped the Mexican quilt about her,
+the house was quiet. All youthful Madigans were abed, and the older ones
+were in secure seclusion.
+
+It was a small Saint Cecilia, with a short, stiff braid standing out
+from one side of her head, and utterly without musical enthusiasm, that
+sat down in the darkness at the old square piano. "La Gazelle" was out
+of the question, for she had no lamp and she did not yet know the trills
+and runs of her new "piece" by heart. But the five-finger exercises and
+the scales that it had been her custom to run over slightingly while she
+read from a paper novel by the Duchess open in front of her music--this
+much of an atonement was still within her power.
+
+With her bare foot on the soft pedal, that none might hear her, Sissy
+played. It was dark and very quiet; the hush-hush of the throbbing mines
+filled the night and stilled it. At times her heart stood still for fear
+that she might be discovered; at other times the longing for a
+sensational uncovering of her belated and extraordinary goodness seized
+her, and her naked foot slipped from the cold pedal only to be hurriedly
+replaced before the jangle of the keys could escape.
+
+How long she practised, and whether she redeemed herself and Number 9,
+Sissy never knew, for she fell asleep at last over the keys and was
+waked by a hoarse scream and a wild cry of "De debbil! De debbil!"
+
+It was Wong, the Chinaman, who had but one name for all things
+supernatural. Coming home from Chinatown, he was passing the glass door
+near which the piano stood when he saw the slender figure in its
+trailing white drapery bowed over the keys.
+
+Sissy looked up, sleep still bewildering her, and yet awake enough to be
+fearful of consequences. She tore open the door and sped after the
+Chinaman to enlighten him, but her pursuit only confirmed Wong's
+conception of that mission of malice which is devil's work on earth. A
+terrified howl burst from him. There was only one being on earth of whom
+he stood in greater awe than the thing he fancied he was fleeing from;
+that one, logically, must be greater than It. Taking his very life in
+his hand, he doubled, darted past the shivering Thing, flew on through
+the open door, and made straight for the master's room.
+
+For Sissy there was nothing to do but to follow.
+
+"I wanted to be good," she wailed, unnerved, when Aunt Anne had her by
+the shoulder and was catechizing her in the presence of a nightgowned
+multitude of excited Madigans.
+
+But succor came from an unexpected quarter. "Let the child alone, Anne,"
+growled Madigan, adjusting the segment of the leg of woolen underwear
+which he wore for a nightcap; and seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her
+off to bed.
+
+"Papa's pet! Papa's baby!" mouthed Irene, under her breath, as she
+danced tauntingly along behind his back.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "Seizing Sissy in his arms, he bore her off to bed"]
+
+And Sissy, outraged in all the dignity of her eleven years at being
+carried like a child, but unspeakably happy in her father's favor,
+looked over his shoulder with a sheepish, smiling, sleepy face,
+murmuring, "Sour grapes, Split, sour grapes!"
+
+Afterward, encouraged by the darkness and the strangeness of being laid
+in bed from her father's arms, Sissy held him a moment by her side.
+
+"When men make promises on paper that they can't keep, father," she
+whispered, "what do they do?"
+
+"Oh, go to sleep, child! They become bankrupt, I suppose."
+
+"And--and what becomes of the paper?"
+
+"What do you know or care about such things? Will you go to sleep
+to-night?"
+
+"If you had any bankrupt's paper," she pleaded, catching hold of his
+hand as he turned to leave her, "what would you do with it--please,
+father!"
+
+"Why, tear it up, you goose."
+
+With a jump, Sissy was bolt upright in bed and holding up a fluttering,
+much-folded sheet, an almost incredulous joy in her eager voice.
+
+"Take mine and pretend I was bankrupt--please--oh, please!"
+
+To Madigan all children, his own particularly, were such unaccountable
+beings that a vagary more or less could not more hopelessly perplex his
+misunderstanding of them. With a "Tut! tut!" of impatience, he took the
+paper from her and tore it twice across.
+
+A long sigh of relief came from Sissy as the bits fluttered to the
+floor. "You're such a nice father!" she murmured happily, and fell
+asleep, a blissful bankrupt instead of a Pharisee.
+
+
+
+
+A PAGAN AND A PURITAN
+
+
+"Split! Split!"
+
+The morning was warm and young; Mount Davidson's side was golden with
+sunflowers. On the long front piazza Mr. Madigan's canaries, in their
+mammoth cage, were like to burst their throats for joy in the promise of
+summer. Irene, every lithe muscle a-play, was hanging by her knees on
+the swinging-bar, her tawny hair sweeping the woodshed floor as she
+swung.
+
+"Split, I say!"
+
+The tone was commanding--such a tone as Sissy dared assume only on
+Saturday mornings, when her elder sister's necessities delivered Irene
+the Oppressor into her hands.
+
+"Split Madigan!"
+
+In the very exhilaration of effort--the use of her muscles was joy to
+her--Split paused to wish that the house might fall on Sissy; that she
+might suddenly become dumb; that the key to the piano might be
+lost--anything that would avert her own impending doom.
+
+But none of these things happened; they never did happen, no matter how
+passionately the second of the Madigans longed for them on the last day
+of the week.
+
+"Split--you know very well you hear me," the voice cried, coming nearer.
+
+Split burst into song. She was a merry, merry Zingara, she declared in
+sweet, strong cadence, with a boisterous chorus of tra-la-las that
+rivaled the canaries'; and the louder she sang, the faster she swung, so
+that she was really half deaf and wholly giddy when she felt Sissy's
+hand on her ankle.
+
+"Oh, is that you, Sissy?" she asked, sweetly surprised, peering out from
+under her bushy mane.
+
+"Yes, it's me, Sissy!" Cecilia's small, round face was stern. "And
+you've heard me from the very first, and if you want any--"
+
+"Shall I show you how to skin the cat, Sis?" Irene interrupted hastily,
+pulling herself up with a jerk.
+
+But Sissy was fat and had none of her sister's wiry agility. She
+declined; her mind was attuned to other issues just then, and her soul
+was a-quiver with malicious, anticipatory glee; for this was the day of
+Split's music lesson, and her teacher was none other than Sissy herself.
+
+"So, if you want it," the younger sister's voice rose threateningly,
+"you've got to come now."
+
+"Let's leave it till the afternoon." Split's voice came from somewhere
+in the midst of her evolutions.
+
+"Will you come?" demanded Sissy peremptorily. "Once!"
+
+How could Split answer? Her mouth was tight shut; she was pulling
+herself up inch by inch, slowly, slowly, till her chin should rest upon
+the bar.
+
+"Will you come? Twice!"
+
+Split's face was purple, and there was an agonized prayer for delay in
+her eyes.
+
+"Will you come? Third--and la-ast--" Sissy prolonged the note
+quaveringly. It was not her intention to provoke her victim beyond
+endurance. These lessons, which gave her the whip-hand over the doughty
+and invincible Split, were far too precious to her.
+
+"And la-ast," she repeated inexorably.
+
+With a thud Irene dropped to the floor. Leaving all her
+light-heartedness behind in the dusk of the shed, where the trapeze
+still swung, she followed, a sullen captive; while Cecilia, gloating
+like the despot she was, led the way.
+
+"We'll begin with the piece," said Split, eagerly, seating herself
+before the piano.
+
+"No; scales and exercises first," declared Sissy, firmly. "Sit farther
+back, Split, and keep your wrist up."
+
+Split moved the stool a millionth of an inch. Why, oh, why had she
+quarreled with Professor Trask? If some one had only told her that her
+own rebellion would mean the substitution of Cecilia for herself as his
+pupil, and another opportunity for that apt young perfectionist to
+outrank her senior!
+
+With a rattling verve, and a dime on each wrist, which Professor Cecilia
+had placed there to effect a divorce between finger and arm movement,
+Irene attacked her scales and exercises. She loathed five-finger
+exercises. So did the talented but lazy Sissy, who knew well from
+experience what torture would most try her victim's soul. Split merely
+wanted to play well, to outplay Cecilia, to be independent of her and
+play her own accompaniments.
+
+"Lift your fingers, Split. You must raise your wrist," came in an easy
+tone of command. "Repeat that, please. Again. There goes the dime
+again! If you'd keep your wrist steady, it wouldn't fall off. No; you're
+playing altogether too fast. Slowly! slow-ly! Bad fingering! bad
+fingering! Wretched! Wait, I'll mark it for you."
+
+With her nicely pointed long pencil, Sissy, a martinet for technic,
+assumed all the airs of her own professor and prepared to explain the
+obvious.
+
+"No, you don't!" Irene's hand shot out from the keys to the sheet-music,
+scattering the dimes; her wide-spread fingers covered the spot Sissy
+contemplated adorning with prettily made figures.
+
+"Don't what?" asked Sissy.
+
+"Oh, Miss Innocence! Don't be so affected, that's what! Don't put on so
+many airs! Don't pretend you know it all, Sis Madigan!"
+
+"Why, Split! Do you s'pose I _want_ to put the fingering down?"
+
+"You do; but you sha'n't!" exclaimed Split, savagely.
+
+"All I want to do is to help you," said Sissy, with well-bred
+forbearance.
+
+"Well, don't show off, then."
+
+Split withdrew her hand, and the lesson proceeded.
+
+"I'll play your piece for you first, Split, to show you how it ought to
+go." Sissy rose, her calico rustling, to change the professorial chair
+for the stool of the demonstrator.
+
+But Split sat like a rock.
+
+"Professor Trask always does, Split."
+
+There was an abused note in Sissy's voice that deceived her sister. In
+the perennial game of "bluff" these two played, each was alert to detect
+a weakness in the other; and Irene thought she had found one now.
+Ignoring her professor, she placed "In Sweet Dreams" on the rack before
+her, and gaily and loudly, and very badly, began to play.
+
+Sissy rose majestically. Her correct ear was outraged, her small mouth
+was shut tight. Without a word she resigned her post and made for the
+door. She had quite reached it before Split capitulated.
+
+"Play it, then, you mean thing," she cried, flouncing off the stool, "if
+it's going to do you any good!"
+
+Sissy hardened. She had a way of becoming adamant on rare occasions that
+really struck terror to Split's facile soul, which resented a grudge
+promptly and as promptly forgot all about it.
+
+"I don't care to play it," said Sissy, loftily.
+
+"Well--I want you to--now."
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'Play it, then, you mean thing,' she cried, ... 'if
+      it's going to do you any good!'"]
+
+"But I don't want to."
+
+"Ain't you going to give me my lesson, then?" demanded Split, hoarsely.
+"I thought you were so anxious to help me!"
+
+Sissy was mute. Hers was a strong position, she felt.
+
+"D' ye expect me to get down on my knees?" Irene's wrathful voice rose,
+and her unstable temper rocked threateningly. A Madigan would willingly
+have been flayed alive rather than apologize in so many words.
+
+"I don't expect anything at all," remarked Sissy, coldly.
+
+"Well, you'd better expect, for"--with a swift motion that cut off her
+sister's retreat and put her own back to the door--"you'll play that
+piece before you go out of this room."
+
+Without a word Sissy plumped down on the floor. Unconcernedly she pulled
+her jackstones out of her pocket, and soon their regular click-clock and
+the deft thump of her small, fat fist was all that was heard in the
+room.
+
+It always seemed to Split that the last occasion of a disagreement
+between herself and the sister nearest to her in years, and furthest
+from her in temperament, was the most intolerable. Never in her life,
+she thought, had she so longed to murder Sissy as at this minute.
+She--Split--had no time to waste besieging the impregnable fortress of
+Sissy's mulishness, when the hardening process had really set in. There
+never was time enough on Saturdays to do half what one planned, and
+to-day was the day of Crosby Pemberton's party, besides.
+
+And still Split remained at the door, and still Sissy played jackstones.
+Twice there were skirmishes between besieger and besieged--once when
+Split crept upon Sissy and, with a quick thrust of her slim, straight
+leg, disarranged an elaborate scheme for "putting horses in the stable,"
+and once when there was a strategic sortie from Sissy, which failed to
+catch the enemy napping.
+
+It was Split who finally yielded, as, with rage in her heart, she had
+known from the very beginning would be the case. But no Madigan ever
+laid down her arms and surrendered formally.
+
+Split threw open the door with a bang. "Go out, then, miss! go out!" she
+commanded.
+
+Calmly and skilfully Sissy finished the "devil on a stump," the last of
+those ornamental additions the complexities of which appeal to experts
+in the game; then she gathered up her beloved jackstones and got to her
+feet. But dignity forbade that she should leave the room just when her
+foe had ordered her to go. So she ignored the invitation, and going to
+the piano, sat down in an ostentatiously correct position, requiring
+many adjustments and readjustments, and began to play "The Gazelle."
+
+She played prettily, did this young person, who seemed to Split
+specially designed to infuriate her. And to-day she played "with
+expression," soft-pedaling and lingering upon certain passages in a way
+which the Madigans considered shameless.
+
+"Oh, the affected thing! Just listen to her! How she does put on!"
+sneered Split to the world at large.
+
+Sissy's lips opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for
+no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a
+moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided
+into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would draw blood. And
+it did.
+
+"You sha'n't play it now! You sha'n't!" Split cried, her ungovernable
+temper aroused. She dashed impetuously for the piano and tore the sheet
+of music from the rack.
+
+It was the thing for which she had suffered so many lessons; for which
+she had sat feeling like a mean-spirited imbecile with Sissy's
+impertinent finger under her wrist, while all outdoors was calling to
+her; for which she had forborne often and often during the week, only to
+be more thoroughly bullied on Saturdays. Yet she tore it across and
+recklessly trampled it underfoot. Then with her hands over her ears,
+lest she hear the imperturbable and maddeningly excellent Sissy play "In
+Sweet Dreams" without the notes, Split fled.
+
+Sissy played on till the very last bar; she had an idea that Split might
+be ambushed out in the hall. But when she got to the end and heard no
+sound from there, she decided that the enemy was indeed vanquished, and
+she rose to close the piano. As she did so she got a view of an
+elegantly stout and very upright lady coming up the front steps, with a
+fair, pale boy by her side.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman,'
+      bullied Mrs. Pemberton"]
+
+With an agility commendable in one so round, Sissy dropped beneath the
+piano, and, whipping off her apron, proceeded to wipe the dust from the
+back legs of the instrument with it. This done, she rammed the apron up
+between the wall and the piano, and was seated, breathless, but with a
+bit of very dirty white embroidery in her hands, when the lady entered.
+
+"Ah, Cecilia, busy as usual," she said in an important, throaty voice.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Pemberton," said Sissy, softly.
+
+"You see, Crosby, that even a child may make use of spare moments. Why
+don't you say how-d'-ye-do to Cecilia? Where're your manners?" demanded
+the lady.
+
+"Yes, 'm. How-do, Sissy?" asked the boy, uncomfortably. He was a very
+prim child, immaculately dressed, his smooth hair plastered neatly down
+over his forehead; and he sat bolt upright on the edge of his chair, for
+he knew well his mother's views about lounging.
+
+"Go and shake hands properly, like a little gentleman," bullied Mrs.
+Pemberton.
+
+With a sickly smile Crosby walked over to Sissy and grasped her hand. He
+let it go with an "Ouch!" that made Mrs. Pemberton turn majestically and
+glare at him.
+
+"I'm so sorry I stuck you, Crosby," said Sissy, softly, smoothing out
+her embroidery. "I forgot there was a needle in my work."
+
+Crosby looked at her; he knew just how sorry she was.
+
+"The thing to say, Crosby," thundered his mama, "is, 'Not at all, not at
+all, Cecilia!'"
+
+"Not at all--not at all, Cecilia," squeaked the boy, his thin voice like
+a faint echo of his mother's heavy contralto.
+
+Sissy yearned to beat him; she always did. That she did not invariably
+yield to her desire to express her resentment of so awfully mothered a
+person, was due solely to a sentiment of chivalry: he was so weak and so
+devoted to herself, and it took some courage to be devoted to Sissy.
+
+"I'm ashamed of my son!" thundered Mrs. Pemberton.
+
+Yes, Sissy knew that formula. She had heard the announcement first one
+memorable day at school when she led a revolt against the master--a
+revolt which only the girls of her clique were expected to indorse. But
+Crosby, either because he was so accustomed to playing with girls that
+he considered himself one of them, or because of that dogged devotion
+which even so stern a puritan as Sissy could not sufficiently
+discourage, had taken the cue from her lips. He, too, had failed
+publicly and vicariously, in the very presence of his lion-hearted,
+bull-voiced mother, and sat a white-faced criminal awaiting execution,
+when Mrs. Pemberton, rising in her voluminous black silk skirts, like an
+outraged and peppery hen, stood a moment speechless with wrath, and
+then broke forth with her denunciation before the whole school, visitors
+and all. "Mr. Garvan," she had exclaimed in a deep voice all a-tremble,
+"I am ashamed of my son!" and sailed majestically from the room.
+Crosby's action had really touched Sissy at the time, though, like the
+diplomat she was, she had promptly disowned it.
+
+But to-day Mrs. Pemberton's shame did not too much affect her offspring,
+who sat, not quite so upright now, squeezing the blood from the finger
+that Sissy's needle had pricked.
+
+"Let me look at your embroidery, Cecilia," said the lady, patronizingly.
+
+Sissy rose and brought it to her. Before Crosby she tried not to show
+it, but this little Madigan was really suffering in her perfect soul:
+she embroidered so badly, and knew it so well.
+
+"H'm!" Mrs. Pemberton drew off her glove. "Make your stitches even, and
+keep your work clean--like this--like this--see?"
+
+Sissy saw. Under the firm, big, white hand the strawberry leaves and
+blossoms sprang up and flourished. Mrs. Pemberton loved to embroider;
+her voice was almost gentle when she painted on linen with her needle,
+and then only did she forget to bully her boy.
+
+"Perhaps you will play for us, Cecilia, if I do a bit of your work for
+you?"
+
+Sissy knew it was coming. Mrs. Pemberton always asked her to play, and
+playing for company was pure show-off from a Madigan point of view.
+Split would hear and taunt her with it later, she knew. But though she
+scorned the servile and downtrodden Crosby, Sissy, no more than he,
+dared disobey that grenadier, his mother. She took her seat at the
+piano, opened a Beethoven that Mrs. Pemberton had given her the last
+Christmas, under the impression that she was fostering a taste for the
+classical, and, with a revengeful little hand that couldn't reach the
+octaves, she began to murder the "Funeral March."
+
+Just as the performer let her hands fall upon the last somber chord (her
+puritanical soul enjoying the double dissipation of pretending to
+herself while she afflicted others), she lifted her eyes to the mirror
+over the piano and saw Irene out in the hall. In the mirror their eyes
+met, and the mockery in Irene's was unmistakable as Sissy rose,
+agitated, caught in the very act of showing off, convicted of being
+affected.
+
+"Very pretty; very pretty, indeed!" said Mrs. Pemberton,
+absent-mindedly. "Now play another little waltz."
+
+"Aunt Anne says, Mrs. Pemberton," put in Irene, entering, "will you come
+to her room?"
+
+Mrs. Pemberton rose, her deft hands still calling forth the perfection
+of fruit from the stubborn linen soil upon which Sissy could make
+nothing grow, and sailed across the hall. Crosby immediately jumped from
+his chair.
+
+"I say, Sissy," he cried, "I know an awful swell way to cut paper-doll
+dresses."
+
+Sissy looked at him. For all her sins (and in a hidden corner of her
+heart that she rarely looked into, she knew herself for the hypocrite
+she was, despite all her self-righteous pretense) this girl-boy's
+devotion was her punishment. She did not envy Split her successes; in
+fact, she often disapproved the methods by which they were attained. Her
+pride would permit her neither to make such conquests, nor to enjoy them
+when they were made; but she cursed her fate that Crosby Pemberton had
+fallen to her share. For the love of a really bad boy Sissy felt she
+could have sacrificed much--for a fellow quite out of the pale, a bold,
+wicked pirate of a boy who would say "Darn," and even smoke a cigarette;
+a daredevil, whose people could do nothing with him; a fellow with a
+swagger and a droop to his eyelid and something deliciously sinister in
+his lean, firm jaw and saucy black eye--a boy like Jack Cody, for
+instance, for whom a whole world of short-skirted femininity divided
+itself naturally into two classes: just girls--and Split Madigan. But
+that a forthright, practical, severe person like herself should be made
+ridiculous by Crosby's worship, and that Split, her arch-enemy, should
+be there to hear her adorer make his sexless declaration, was too much!
+Even a Madigan could not bear up under it. When Sissy looked from "Miss
+Crosby" (as the very girls who played with him called him) to Split,
+there were tears of rage trembling in her eyes.
+
+But, with a generosity suspiciously unlike her, Split ignored the signal
+of distress. "What time this afternoon will the party begin, Crosby?"
+she asked.
+
+"Oh, two o'clock. But you'll come early, won't you--Sissy?"
+
+Sissy did not answer. She was waiting to see what Split's next move
+would be.
+
+"I don't know that I can go," said Split, gently. "I haven't any
+gloves--unless--won't you ask father for some, Sissy?"
+
+There was a prompt refusal upon Sissy's lips, but she did not utter it;
+the Pembertons' visit had given the enemy too much material with which
+to regale her fellow-Madigans at the dinner-table in the evening. Sissy
+looked questioningly into Split's eyes, and silently the bargain was
+struck: to so much refraining from ridicule in public on the part of
+one, a certain indebtedness which the other might discharge by facing
+Francis Madigan with a demand for money. It was hard, but Sissy shut her
+teeth and got to her feet.
+
+"Can I come with you, Sissy?" asked Crosby, following her to the door.
+"If you'll let me have your tissue-paper and the scissors, I'll show--"
+
+Sissy's hands flew to her breast. "I wish--I wish you'd never speak to
+me again!" she exclaimed, and Crosby dodged as though he were
+apprehensive that she might beat him.
+
+"It's so kind of you to go the very minute I ask," giggled Split,
+gleefully.
+
+But Sissy shut the door behind her on Crosby's woeful face and Split's
+radiantly happy one, and went to her fate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "Of the design and construction of which he was quite
+      vain"]
+
+Francis Madigan's room was his castle. It was his castle and his
+workshop and his boudoir, his kitchen, his library, and his pantry in
+one. The laxness of the family housekeeping had led him to distrust all
+hands and heads but his own. Everything that he wanted, or that he might
+want in the near future, he kept under his eyes, within reach of his
+hands, where none might borrow or lose or destroy. In order to provide
+for the needs which grew and changed daily, he fitted up rude shelf
+above shelf, till the corners of the room were transformed into rough
+bric-a-brac stands. Mr. Madigan had the unsuccessful man's pride in
+trifling successes in amateur carpentering, in husbandry of any sort
+unrelated to the real issues of his life; and every tool he needed for
+the exercise of his skill he kept under lock and key. He believed in, he
+trusted no Madigan. He had been known to lend his penknife to Sissy, but
+that was when she was ailing long ago. He laid in supplies as though he
+had inside information of a famine near at hand; and his pipes and his
+great cans of tobacco were piled up with his cards and his books on the
+table where he played solitaire all day and read half the night. The
+sweets he liked occasionally, and the day's provision of fruit (for he
+ate fruit only and at this time looked upon a vegetarian as a coarse
+creature who belonged to a dead era), were packed in a small home-made
+pantry of the design and construction of which he was quite vain. His
+bed swathed in sheets; his blankets sewed securely together, as though
+he feared they might escape; a device all his own of great wooden wedges
+raising the lower end of the mattress so that his feet were on a level
+with his pillowed head; the chest of little drawers which his daughters
+called "father's hobby," nailed high on the wall and filled with all
+sorts of odds and ends, the detritus and possible repair-material of
+years of housekeeping--all this Sissy took in with the unseeing eyes one
+has for the familiar.
+
+She did not expect her father's room to be like any one else's; neither
+did she look for an easy and successful termination to her quest.
+Sometimes she got what she asked for, but she asked for little. And
+to-day Francis Madigan had been tinkering at the old house, hammering
+here and patching there, a process that specially tried his temper,
+being a threatening indication of change, which he resented by declaring
+that "everything goes to the devil."
+
+"Father," began Sissy, carefully, as she met his inquiring eye, "do you
+approve of dancing?"
+
+He looked up from his cards. "What nonsense are you talking now?"
+
+"Because Irene and I have a good chance to practise it--dancing--this
+afternoon."
+
+"Well--practise," he growled.
+
+"Shall we? All right. It's Crosby's party, you know. He's thirteen
+to-day. It's his party. His mother's giving it for him at Cooper's Hall.
+And there'll be dancing and--"
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Yes," agreed Sissy, sweetly. "But we'll go if you say so. I won't need
+any dress, and--" she hurried on as he raised his head belligerently,
+"neither will Irene. Isn't that lucky? My brown will do, though the
+over-skirt does jump up when I dance and show the red sham underneath;
+but--"
+
+"What are you bothering me about, then?" he demanded indignantly,
+throwing down his cards.
+
+"Gloves," she said gently. Then quickly, before he could speak, "That's
+all. They don't cost very much. Or, I'll tell you,"--her voice grew
+suddenly most cheerful, as though she had made a discovery that must
+delight him,--"we can wear mitts. I don't mind--and neither will Split.
+Just a pair of blue lace ones for her and pink for me, or--or--" her
+voice wavered, but she was ready to pay the price, "just blue ones for
+Split, father."
+
+He put his hand in his pocket. "Why not just pink ones for Sissy?" he
+asked almost good-naturedly.
+
+Sissy shook her head, but the red rushed to her cheeks. She had won!
+
+"Are you sure you need them?" he asked cautiously in the very act of
+bestowal.
+
+"Sure! Sure!" she cried, throwing her arms gratefully about his neck
+before she danced to the door.
+
+"But you're going, too?" he called after her. "All right, then. Make
+Irene behave. She's an ox--that girl."
+
+An ox, of course, interpreted variously according to Madigan's mood and
+the correlating circumstances, signified this time an indiscreet,
+pleasure-mad child. Sissy understood, and she blushed for her sister. In
+fact, she was always blushing for her sister. She considered it to be
+her duty formally and officially to disavow her senior. So reprehensible
+did she feel Split's conduct to be that some one must blush for it; and
+as blushing was not Split's forte, Sissy did it for her.
+
+And she really did it very well, with an assumption of chagrin that
+could not fail to call attention subtly to the contrast between the
+sisters. When Split failed in her lessons with a completeness, a
+sensational ostentation that was shocking to Sissy, that Number 1
+scholar blushed gently, and, discreetly lowering her head, became
+absorbed in her work. After school, when Split was being kept in and
+disciplined (a process which never failed effectually to discipline the
+hardy individual who attempted it), when she wept and stormed and raged
+and threw caution to the winds as only tempestuous Split could, then was
+Sissy's attitude a marvel of disapproving rectitude. She had a great
+deal of dignity, had Sissy, and the picture of holiness that she
+presented as, with her books on her arm, she walked past the desk where
+the sobbing sinner's head lay with tumbled curls and bloated face, came
+as near as anything could to quench the passion of tears in which
+Split's tempers culminated. On such occasions the infuriated Split was
+wont, for just a moment, to conquer the half-hysterical sobs that
+threatened to choke her as well as inundate the world, and make a face
+at Saint Cecilia as she passed holily by. But Cecilia was a Madigan
+always, as well as a saint temporarily, and her eyes were turned
+prudently away just then, as though she were already studiously
+pondering to-morrow's lesson.
+
+But Sissy blushed her most perfect disapproval when she played chaperon
+to her elder sister. It was a position for which she felt herself
+peculiarly fitted, even without the semi-official commission she held--a
+position which so conscientious a person could not regard in the light
+of a sinecure.
+
+As she danced only the more sedate dances, because of that obtrusive
+tendency of the red sham to her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her
+senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene
+danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a
+rain-storm, a butterfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat
+the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. She was on the floor with the
+first note Professor Trask struck, and she danced down the side of the
+little hall, when the waltz was over and all the other couples had
+seated themselves, as though the meter of the music had bewitched her
+feet and they might nevermore walk soberly.
+
+"Split--don't!" It was the shocked voice of her young chaperon.
+
+"Sissy--don't!" mocked the mutinous Split.
+
+Even after she took the seat beside Sissy, her heels were lifted and the
+toes of her slippers were beating time. She sat there chattering to a
+group of boys buzzing about her, upon whom her high spirits had the
+effect that dance-music had upon herself.
+
+"You're the prettiest girl I've seen since I left the city, Irene,"
+patronizingly whispered the boy lately from San Francisco, whose
+metropolitan elegances had dazzled the eyes of the mountain maidens.
+
+"I wonder how many girls Will Morrow's said that to this afternoon!"
+came like a sarcastic douche from Sissy, who conceived it to be a
+chaperon's duty to take the conceit out of citified chaps.
+
+Young Morrow turned to find a small woman in brown eying him
+disdainfully.
+
+"Well--well, I never said it to you, anyway," he retorted gallantly.
+
+"Good reason why. You knew I wouldn't believe you," Sissy declared,
+floundering in her anger.
+
+"Neither would anybody else."
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "The Belle of the Afternoon"]
+
+"Why? Because you said it? Didn't know you had such a reputation." Sissy
+was recovering. "Never mind, Split," she added, heavily sarcastic and
+assuming a comforting air that maddened Irene, who desired nothing more
+than to impress her new suitor with the elegant gentility of her manner,
+her family's, and all that was hers. "Just to have a boy from the city
+even pretend to think you're good-looking is worth living for. Boys know
+so much--in the city!" she concluded witheringly.
+
+Mr. Morrow from San Francisco looked bewildered. He had merely paid what
+he considered a very dashing compliment to one girl, when lo! the other
+overwhelmed him with her contempt. He turned for consolation to Irene.
+
+"I'll show you how they dance the two-step in the city," he said,
+holding out his hand as the music began again.
+
+But he had reckoned without that stern censor of sisterly manners,
+Cecilia Madigan; that loyal Comstocker who resented the implication of
+her town's inferiority, quite independent of the fact that the insult
+was not addressed to her but to one who, apparently, welcomed it.
+
+"I think I'll go home now, Split," she remarked carelessly, rising.
+
+A sudden blight fell upon the belle of the afternoon. When Sissy went,
+go she must, too; this was the sole rule of conduct Francis Madigan had
+devised for the guidance of his most headstrong daughter.
+
+"Oh, Sissy--not till after supper!" she pleaded piteously.
+
+"I--I've got some studying to do for the examination Monday," explained
+the exemplary member of Mr. Garvan's class and society at large.
+
+"Just wait till this one dance is over!" Coaxing was not Split Madigan's
+forte; she was accustomed to demand.
+
+But it was just that one dance that Sissy, the pure and patriotic, could
+not countenance.
+
+A quick flash of fury lighted Irene's eye. To be bossed publicly and
+before Mr. Will Morrow of San Francisco! In her heart she swore to be
+avenged; yet she dropped Mr. Morrow's hand and shook her head to all his
+pleadings, as she followed her ruthless tyrant across the floor to the
+little dressing-room.
+
+But as the sisters emerged from the dressing-room door, Crosby Pemberton
+and his cousin Fred stopped them.
+
+"You're not going home, Split?" begged Fred. "I've been looking
+everywhere for you. Oh, come and dance just this one with me!"
+
+"Sissy's going," said Split, the lilting of the music stirring her
+pulses and lifting her feet, despite the unmusical rage she was in, "and
+I've got to go, too."
+
+"Won't you stay--won't you wait just for this one, Sissy?" begged Fred.
+
+"Why--certainly," acquiesced the gentle Sissy.
+
+Split gasped with amazement. But she wasted no time, throwing off her
+jacket with a quick twist of her wrist. Later she might fathom the
+tortuosities of her tyrant's mind. All she knew now was that she might
+dance. With whom was a small matter to Split Madigan.
+
+Sissy watched her dance away, delight and malice in her eye. She was
+watching till Mr. Morrow from the city should behold her revenge. But
+Crosby did not know this, and he had plans of his own.
+
+"Come and play a game over in the corner, just till this dance's over,
+won't you, Sissy?"
+
+"What kind of a game?" she demanded, following him mechanically.
+
+"Oh, a new game. It's lots of fun. I'll show you."
+
+Sissy consented. She could play a game--and she knew she was clever at
+all games--without fear of betrayal from that red sham which she had
+been fiercely sitting upon half the afternoon.
+
+Before long, her emulative spirit got her so interested in this
+particular game that she forgot not only the sham skirt but the sham
+pretense upon which she had bullied Irene. And she played so well that
+there was only one forfeit against her name, though Crosby, who had
+named himself treasurer, held half the bangle bracelets and pins and
+handkerchiefs of the little circle as evidence of dereliction in others.
+
+He called her name first, as he stood with her little turquoise ring in
+his hand and an odd light in his eye that might have enlightened her;
+but she was looking toward the door, where the young gentleman from San
+Francisco, in a Byronic pose, was staring gloomily at Irene dancing with
+a rival, and so joying in the dance that she had forgotten all about
+him.
+
+    "Open your mouth and shut your eyes,
+    And I'll give you something to make you wise,"
+
+chanted Crosby, holding out the ring and beckoning to her.
+
+Closing her eyes upon the spectacle of Mr. Morrow's suffering, Sissy
+opened a mouth about which the malicious smile still lingered.
+
+Crosby hesitated a moment. He was very much afraid of her, but as she
+stood, docile and innocent, before him, with her eyes shut and her tiny
+red mouth open, he could not fancy consequences nearly so well as he
+could picture the thing his wish painted.
+
+In a moment he had realized it, and Sissy, overwhelmed by astonishment,
+dumb and impotent with the audacity of the unexpected, felt his arms
+close about her and his greedy lips upon hers.
+
+Oh, the rage and shame of the proper Sissy! Her mouth fell shut and her
+eyes flew open. And then, if she could, she would have closed them
+forever; for, before her in the sudden silence, towering above the
+triumphant and unrepentant Crosby, stood Mrs. Pemberton, a portentous
+figure of shocked matronly disapproval. And she promptly placed the
+blame where mothers of sons have placed it since the first similar
+impropriety was discovered.
+
+"Cecilia!" she cried in that velvety bass that echoed through the
+room--"Cecilia Madigan, you--teaching my son a vulgar kissing game--you,
+the good one! Oh, you deceitful little thing!"
+
+
+
+
+A MERRY, MERRY ZINGARA
+
+
+It had been Crosby Pemberton's custom to climb the steps that led to
+Madigan's every Wednesday afternoon at four, with his music neatly done
+up in a roll, on his way to play duets with Sissy.
+
+On the Wednesday that followed his birthday party--the mere mention of
+which, after the lapse of four days, was enough to send Sissy into
+hysterics--that young lady was seated in the parlor, ready for her
+guest. She was ready for him in all the senses a Madigan knew how to
+infuse into that frame of mind. She intended to make him as miserable as
+she herself had been ever since that disgraceful episode in which she
+had so innocently played the victim's part. She would show the betrayer
+of trust no mercy--none. She would accept no apology. She would trample
+upon his excuses and tear them limb from limb. She would show him her
+scorn and detestation and make him feel how everlastingly unforgivable
+his offense was; then she would send him forth forever from the house,
+and dare him to so much as speak to her at school.
+
+She pictured him going down the stairs for the last time, utterly
+wretched, broken, despised, condemned. And in order to make the picture
+more real, she glanced out of the window. Suddenly her hands flew in
+terror to her breast, and all her plans for vengeance were left hanging
+in mid-air; for it was not Crosby's trim little figure that was climbing
+the steps, but the stately solidity of Mrs. Pemberton herself.
+
+In her extremity, Sissy did not even stop to look at the back legs of
+the piano; she sped across the room and made a flying leap through the
+low west window. Mrs. Pemberton, glancing in through the open door as
+she rang the bell, got a glimpse of two plump disappearing legs, but
+when she and Miss Madigan entered, there was no trace of Sissy except
+her jackstones. They stumbled over these, lying scattered on the floor,
+where she had been sitting waiting for Crosby and concocting schemes of
+punishment.
+
+"I come to explain--" said Mrs. Pemberton, stiffly and a bit out of
+breath, seating herself with a rigidity of backbone that would have
+justified Sissy's bestowal upon her of the nickname Mrs. Ramrod, if she
+could have seen it. But Sissy, lying attentive beneath the open window,
+could not see; she could only hear. "I am here to tell you, Miss
+Madigan, why Crosby did not come to-day to play duets."
+
+"Dear me! didn't he come?" asked Miss Madigan, absently. "He isn't sick,
+is he? Irene complains of headache and backache, and she's so languid
+she let Sissy get the wish-bone--I call it the bone of contention--at
+dinner yesterday without a struggle. I'm half afraid she'll not be able
+to sing to-night at Professor Trask's concert; but perhaps it's only
+that she danced too much at Crosby's party. She al--"
+
+"It's about that--about the party that I wanted to speak to you,"
+interrupted Mrs. Pemberton, severely.
+
+"Yes? Such a lovely party, the girls say! I'm sure, Mrs. Pemberton, it's
+just--"
+
+"Did they tell you what--occurred?"
+
+Miss Madigan blinked reflectively. Her acquaintance with the stately and
+wealthy Mrs. Warren Pemberton was her most prized social connection.
+What could have occurred?
+
+"Why, of course, of course!" she laughed after a bit, pleasantly, still
+trying to remember what the girls had gossiped about. "Delightful,
+wasn't it?"
+
+Mrs. Pemberton lifted her plumed head with a slow and terrible
+solemnity. "De-lightful, Miss Madigan, de-lightful!"
+
+The smile vanished from Miss Madigan's face. "I hope, dear Mrs.
+Pemberton, that the girls did nothing that--that--They're such madcaps,
+and their father never will--"
+
+Miss Madigan's distress touched her august visitor. "I trust this," she
+said significantly, "will be a lesson to Mr. Madigan."
+
+"What--what will? If there's a lesson for Madigan, let him have it
+direct, Mrs. Pemberton."
+
+Lying flat on her stomach beneath the window, Sissy heard her father's
+voice come clanging harshly on the lighter-timbred dialogue. Cautiously
+she raised herself on her elbow and let a single eye peer through the
+curtain at the group within. There, with his paint-pot in his hand, his
+brush and his pipe in the other, his unique nightcap rakishly on one
+side and drawn over his white head to protect it from the paint, Madigan
+stood in his overalls and heavy shirt--his Michelangelo costume, Kate
+had called it. He had been regilding an old mirror in his room, and
+having some gilt left at the bottom of his can, he was going about the
+house in search of tarnished articles of virtue.
+
+"Oh, Francis!" exclaimed his sister.
+
+"Why, how do you do, Mr. Madigan?" said Mrs. Pemberton, bravely, putting
+out her hand. "I did not know you were within hearing."
+
+"Or you wouldn't have offered the lesson? Well, give it to me, now that
+I am here. No, I won't shake hands; mine are all sticky with gilt." He
+rested his elbow on his hip and stood at ease.
+
+A savage delight at this outrage upon gentility in Mrs. Ramrod's very
+presence possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within
+herself, Madigan's attitude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident
+voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his
+unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form.
+
+"I must beg your pardon, Mr. Madigan," said that lady, in her most
+official tone, "for using the expression I did. The matter I wished to
+bring to Miss Madigan's attention--and to yours, now that you are
+here--concerns one of your daughters. I should have come to tell you of
+it before, as was my duty, as I would wish any mother to do for me were
+it my daughter; but I have been busy helping the Misses Bryne-Stivers
+and Professor Trask with this concert for to-night. This must be my
+apology for the delay. For speaking--for telling you what I have to
+tell, no mother could apologize."
+
+"H'm!" Madigan cleared his throat threateningly, and out in the
+sage-brush Sissy shook with apprehension. She knew that preliminary
+bugle-call to battle.
+
+"I assure you, my dear Mrs. Pemberton, we can have only the kindest
+feelings for any one who will take an interest in those motherless--"
+
+"Let Mrs. Pemberton go on, Anne," interrupted Madigan, harshly. "Just
+what is it, ma'am? Out with it."
+
+Mrs. Pemberton rose, rustling her heavy silks.
+
+"Merely, Mr. Madigan, that with my own eyes I saw your daughter take
+part in a vulgar kissing game--the only occurrence of any kind that
+marred the perfect propriety of my son's birthday party."
+
+There was a long silence inside. Sissy, without, her heart beating so
+loud that she was afraid it might drown all other sounds, heard, despite
+it, Aunt Anne's gasp of horror, the tinkle of the jet on Mrs.
+Pemberton's heavy gown, the squeaking of her father's paint-spotted
+slippers as he shifted his weight.
+
+Finally it came. "That ox!" exclaimed Madigan, in a rage.
+
+Mrs. Pemberton moved in majesty toward the door. "My son," she said
+slowly, "chivalrously tries to take the blame from her and insists that
+he proposed the game himself. But I know Crosby to be incapable of such
+a thing."
+
+"H'm! Yes. So do I," assented Madigan.
+
+Miss Madigan turned to her brother, and in a voice that suggested long
+years of martyrdom, said: "You will send her to the convent now,
+Francis? You positively must now. I really admire you for the way you
+have discharged a most unpleasant duty, Mrs. Pemberton. For years I've
+insisted that Irene must--"
+
+"Irene? Yes, if it had been Irene, one could expect it," remarked Mrs.
+Pemberton, funereally.
+
+"But it wasn't--it couldn't be--"
+
+"It was Cecilia." Mrs. Pemberton's grief-stricken tones conveyed all the
+disappointment she felt.
+
+Cecilia, on her quaking knees, now peering through the window, saw a
+quick change come over her father's dread countenance. It smoothed, it
+wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.
+
+"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that
+young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had
+swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"
+
+"It was"--Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr.
+Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity
+involved in its completion--"my son Crosby."
+
+"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.
+
+Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she
+had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly,
+though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at.
+As nearly destitute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much
+rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her
+puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.
+
+"Crosby--eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't
+know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am,
+for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she,
+anyway?"
+
+Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at
+that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she
+had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in
+geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.
+
+But outside Sissy wept and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride
+was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged--that her own
+father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or
+try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her very
+soul!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A taste for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself
+in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of
+the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor
+relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the
+Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular
+features of his production must be a failure--this last as a matter of
+course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not
+leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of
+environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least
+important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had
+of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in
+lending children self-confidence as talent itself.
+
+Kate, therefore, who could not sing a note, but who was grace embodied,
+led a chorus of Poppies, whose red tissue-paper garments creaked and
+rustled as they swayed, waving their star-tipped wands and chanting
+"Breathe we now our charmed fragrance."
+
+Florence and Bessie, whom the curse of being twins linked like
+galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth
+the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which
+was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and
+lead in two different directions.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "She was pronounced a 'regular little love' by the Misses
+      Bryne-Stivers"]
+
+Quite self-possessed (even if she was very much off key), Sissy, who was
+the best "speaker" in her class, warbled her part of a sanctimonious
+little duet in which Heliotrope and Mignonette voiced the sentiment--
+
+    "'Tis not in beauty alone we may find
+    Purity, goodness, and wisdom combined"
+
+Even small Frances, most self-conscious of Madigans, in a costume so
+inadequate that Bep's doll would have been scandalized at the idea of
+wearing it, posed and attitudinized as a Dewdrop. She was pronounced a
+"regular little love" by the Misses Bryne-Stivers, whom the Madigans had
+nicknamed the Misses Blind-Staggers--a resentful play upon their
+hyphenated name, as well as a delicate reference to their blue goggles
+that might have served as blinkers.
+
+For Irene, though, as the unquestioned possessor of a voice, a solo had
+been interpolated. She was to repeat, for the first time on the
+professional stage, that renowned success in "The Zingara" which school
+exhibitions had made famous.
+
+Just before the time came for Split to sing, Sissy was hovering about
+the prima donna in the dressing-room. As Miss Heliotrope she wore the
+dark-purple gown which Aunt Anne had made over from her own wardrobe.
+(Being Comstock-born, Sissy knew no flower intimately, and could easily
+be imposed upon as to their habits and colors.) Above it her round
+little dark face looked almost sallow, in spite of the excited red that
+flamed in her cheeks.
+
+The atmosphere of a theater was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of
+escaping gas in the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by
+association of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a
+dramatic situation was the one evidence of sensibility they permitted
+themselves.
+
+Yet Sissy, who was tying the ribbons on Split's tambourine, looked in
+vain for a reflection of that fever of delight which possessed herself.
+Split was cross. She was languid. She was dull. She did not seem to
+enjoy even the pair of slippers she was pulling on. They had been given
+to Sissy by Henrietta Blind-Staggers, and their newness and beauty had
+tempted the poor Zingara. But if Sissy had not felt that the family
+fortunes were at stake, as she always did in the matter of a public
+appearance, she would never have made so generous an offer of her
+cherished property.
+
+"But they seem awful tight, Split," she suggested.
+
+"They're nothing of the sort," snapped Split, wincing as she rose to her
+feet.
+
+"I don't see how you're going to dance in them."
+
+"Will you just leave that to me, Miss Cecilia Morgan Madigan, and mind
+your own business?"
+
+   [Illustration:
+     "'I don't see how you're going to dance in them'"]
+
+Deeply offended, Sissy withdrew. No one called her Cecilia Morgan
+Madigan who did not want to wound her to the soul and remind her of an
+incident it were more generous to forget. She went out to the wings and
+stood there looking upon the stage and Professor Trask, who, as the
+Recluse, was gowned in mysterious flowing black, while he chanted "Here
+would I rest" in a hollow bass. But Sissy was worried. Not even being
+behind the scenes could still her apprehensions about Split. She longed
+to confide in some fellow-Madigan, but Kate was on the other side of the
+stage, and to all her winks and beckonings turned an uninterested back.
+Then, all at once, sooner than she expected, the Recluse departed, the
+scenes shifted; there, alone on the stage, looking white in the glare of
+the footlights, was a bedizened, big-eyed, panting little Zingara, and
+the syncopated prelude began.
+
+Sissy's fingers thrummed it sympathetically upon her knee, but Trask,
+who was playing the accompaniment behind the scenes, had put an
+unfamiliar accent upon the notes. Out on the stage the Zingara was
+beating her tambourine sadly out of time and was longing, with a panicky
+fear, for the familiar touch of Sissy's hand upon the piano.
+
+"Dum--dum-de-dum-dum--dum-dum--dum-dum!"
+
+The notes came like a warning signal. The Zingara's throat was parched,
+her feet ached excruciatingly merely from carrying her weight--how, oh,
+how was she going to dance?
+
+"Dum--dum-de-dum-dum--dum-dum--dum-dum!"
+
+The last note prolonged itself into a summons. The Zingara's eye,
+turning from the faces that danced before her, sent appealing glances to
+the wings, where Sissy yearned toward her, all rivalry drowned in a
+mothering anxiety for her success.
+
+"'I'm a--mer-ry, meh-hi-ri-y--Zin-ga-ra!'" wailed Split, trying to get
+her breath. "'From a--gold-e-en--clime I come!'"
+
+Sissy's hands flew to her breast, then with a wild gesture up over her
+ears, and she fled back to the dressing-room. Split the redoubtable,
+Split the invincible, the impudent, ready, pugnacious Split had
+stage-fright! The world rocked beneath Sissy's feet. Time stopped, and
+all the world stood agape witnessing a Madigan's failure! It seemed to
+the third of them that she could never bear to lift her head again and
+meet a Comstocker's eye and see there that shameful record against the
+family. But she scrambled quickly to her feet when Irene came running
+in, "The Zingara" all unsung.
+
+Irene's face was white and her eyes glittered. Sissy did not dare meet
+them, for, to a Madigan, to put a shame in words or looks was to double
+and triple it. She did not dare to condole; she had no heart to accuse.
+So she bent down again, ostensibly to tie her shoe, in order to give the
+furious little Zingara time to recover and to begin to undress. She
+heard the tambourine's tingling clatter as it was cast to the floor. She
+looked anywhere but at her sister, but she heard buttons give and
+buttonholes rend, and bowed her head to the storm.
+
+"I must say," she remarked in a scornfully careless tone when the
+silence became oppressive, "that Trask plays funny accompaniments." And
+she lifted her head, fancying herself rather clever in finding a
+scapegoat.
+
+She ducked immediately, but not in time. One of her own slippers,--oh,
+the irony of things!--torn off and thrown by Split's impatient hand,
+struck her in the face.
+
+Sissy's cheek flamed. "Did you do that on purpose, Split Madigan?"
+
+Split Madigan had not done it on purpose, for the reason mainly that it
+had not occurred to her. But now that it was done, it was not in her
+present fury against all the world to disclaim intention to insult so
+small a part of it. Glad of an excuse to outrage some one, any
+one,--and, even then, preferably Sissy,--to make her sister share some
+of that hurt and sting and smart that burned within herself, she met
+Sissy's eye maliciously, triumphantly, significantly.
+
+Sissy gasped. She took the slipper in her hand and made for her enemy.
+She intended, she believed, to ram her own best Sunday slipper down
+Split Madigan's throat! And she got quite close before she could have
+been made to believe that anything on earth or anywhere else could alter
+her intention. But a little thing did; merely the sound of voices
+outside the door and a swift, piteous change of expression in that
+defiant face opposite.
+
+Sissy dropped the slipper and flew to the door. She had a glimpse--which
+she pretended not to have seen--of the Merry Zingara crumbling in a
+passion of regretful sobs to the floor. Then she was standing outside,
+her back to the closed door, a determined, fat little Horatius in
+purple, with two red cheeks,--one, indeed, redder than the other where
+the slipper had struck,--vowing to hold the bridge against all comers,
+so that Split might mourn in peace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'But is she _very_ sick?'"]
+
+"But is she _very_ sick?" came the eager question.
+
+"Well--pretty sick," said the doctor, gravely.
+
+"Not very?" Sissy's voice fell disappointedly. She opened the door for
+him and stood at the head of the steps as he prepared cautiously to
+descend.
+
+"You don't want your sister to be dangerously ill, do you?" Dr.
+Murchison demanded sharply, turning upon her.
+
+"N-no," said Sissy.
+
+"Well, see that you don't squabble with her. Your aunt ought to have
+sent for me five days ago, instead of which she lets a sick, nervous,
+half-crazy child dance and sing on the stage. All poppycock!"
+
+"Can I help you down the first step, doctor?" asked Sissy, gratefully.
+
+She was so thankful for his words. No one--not even a Madigan,
+accustomed to be held strictly accountable--could be to blame for a
+failure if she had been ill at the time. The family was almost
+rehabilitated, it seemed to Sissy.
+
+The doctor's dim old eyes looked curiously at her. "I believe you've got
+some deviltry in your head, Sissy. Now, you mind me and let your sister
+alone. There! I'm all right now. I can go all right the rest of the way
+when I'm once started down your infernal stairs. I ought to charge your
+father double rates for risking my old bones on them. Yes, it's all
+right now. It's only the first step that bothers me. It's always the
+first step that costs--eh, Sissy?"
+
+She looked blankly up at him.
+
+He bent down and patted her head. "See here," he said, "I'll bet you've
+got more sense than you want us to believe."
+
+Sissy blushed. It was a tardy tribute, she felt, but as welcome as it
+was deserved.
+
+"With a lot of common sense and a physique like yours, you ought to make
+a good nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly,
+divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and
+how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and
+irritable and--even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that
+recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives;
+and this recognition made him seem more human to them than any other
+adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard
+row to hoe, that poor, bad Split. She must sleep, and you understand
+her--Lord! Lord! the care these queer little devils need!" he muttered,
+shaking his shoulders as he went on down the steps, as though physically
+to throw off responsibility.
+
+Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she
+thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it
+inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the
+sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled
+it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of
+suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure
+missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a
+playmate or a fighting-mate--it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a
+drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It
+must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision
+of pretty young death--herself in white and the mysterious glamour of
+the silent sleep. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!
+
+Split, with shorn head and with wide-open eyes and hard, flushed
+cheeks, lay tossing on the big bed in the room off the parlor, which had
+seldom been used since Frances was born there. "Mother's bed" the
+Madigans always called it, and they crept into it when ailing, as though
+it still held something of the old curative magic for childish aches,
+though all but Kate had forgotten the mother's face as it was before she
+lay down there the last time. Split had a big hot silver dollar in one
+hand,--Francis Madigan's way of recognizing and sympathizing with a
+child's illness,--and in the other an undivided orange, evidence enough
+of an extraordinary occasion in the Madigan household. But she was not
+waking. She was not sleeping. She was not dreaming. She knew that Sissy
+had come in and had squatted on the floor with Bep and Fom, playing
+dolls, probably. Yet she felt that numb, gradual, terrifying enlargement
+of her fingertips, of her limbs, of her tongue, her body, her head, that
+she had been told again and again was mere fancy. With a self-control
+that was unlike her, an unnatural product of her unnatural state, she
+locked her jaws together that she might not scream this once. And in the
+eery stillness that followed the effort, which had made her ears buzz
+and her temples throb, she heard quite sanely Florence's denial of some
+charge her twin had brought against her.
+
+"I didn't do any such thing," she whispered.
+
+"You did," said Bep.
+
+"I didn't."
+
+"Cross your heart to die?"
+
+The scream burst from Irene then--not the cry of delirium, but a sharp,
+terrified, if inarticulate, call for help. If there was one thing Split
+did respect, it was that Reaper whose name she could never hear without
+a quick indrawn breath. Yet--in her heart--she knew that, though others
+might fall at the touch of that fearful scythe, she, Split Madigan, as
+fleet of limb as a coyote and as sound of heart as a young pine-cone,
+could never, never die; that the world could never be when her quick red
+blood should be quiet and her mountain-bred lungs should be stilled.
+
+With a bound Sissy pushed the twins out of the door. She was at the
+bedside when Miss Madigan entered.
+
+"Go outside, Sissy!" she commanded. "Can't you see you're exciting her?
+Isn't it hard enough for me to take care of her when she's so cross?
+She's not to be excited. She's to be kept quiet. There, there,
+Irene--it's only fancy, I tell you! Look at your fingers; they're
+thinner, littler than they ever were. Look at Sissy's; see how much
+bigger they are."
+
+Irene lifted her fingers that had caught Sissy's. She looked from her
+own fevered hand to Sissy's dimpled one and was comforted. But her hold
+on her old enemy did not relax. She had something tangible now to
+reassure her; something that spoke to her in her own language. Her eyes
+closed, her tense little hand dropped wearily, but she held Sissy fast.
+
+When she thought her patient was asleep, Miss Madigan tried to open her
+fingers, but, with something of her old waywardness, Irene resisted. And
+Sissy, with an old-fashioned nod of advice, motioned her aunt to let
+things be. She curled herself up on a corner of the bed, and--it being
+quite safe, no other Madigan being present but this unnatural one lying
+prone, half conscious, half dazed--she put her other hand over the one
+that held hers, and sat there quietly waiting.
+
+The minutes came to seem like hours, but Sissy sat motionless and Miss
+Madigan left the room. Presently an eery humming came from Split's lips.
+Then, mechanically, Sissy's fingers picked out on the spread the simple
+little melody Split sang as in a dream.
+
+"Play it," the sick girl whispered, pushing away the hand she had held.
+
+Sissy jumped as though she had been discovered indulging in gross and
+inexcusable sentimentality. She looked down at Split with a puzzled,
+sheepish smile, wondering how long it had been since her sister had come
+into the real world out of that fantastic one where marvelous things
+might happen.
+
+"Play it!" repeated Split, fretfully.
+
+Sissy rose and walked softly into the front room. She fancied if she
+took a long time, yet appeared about to obey, Split would forget her
+desire and, left alone in the silence, would fall asleep. She opened the
+piano softly and pulled out the stool. Then leisurely she pretended to
+arrange the light and the piano-cover.
+
+Split, quieted by her apparent compliance, lay back with a sigh of
+content. Her mind, whose very apprehension of the delirium had excluded
+other thoughts, dwelt now restfully upon the combination of easy mental
+effort and soothing melody her "piece" meant to her. Besides, she was
+ordering her junior about, using her illness as a club to beat down
+remonstrance. Split was really on the way to being herself again.
+
+After a bit she found that she was almost dozing off, and waked with an
+indignant start to see Sissy stealing softly out of the room.
+
+"Where are you going?" she demanded. "Why don't you play it when I tell
+you to?"
+
+For an instant Sissy rebelled. Then she looked at the passionate little
+figure sitting tensely upright, at the white fever-circle about the dry
+lips, at the short hair and the unnaturally bright, angry eyes. She went
+back to the piano, sat down, and with her foot on the soft pedal, that
+Aunt Anne might not hear, she began to play.
+
+The melody was simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness.
+Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament,
+quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed
+into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying bass was
+rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and physical
+occupation in letting the fingers of her left hand pick out its detail
+upon the pillow which she had lately thrown in a passion against the
+wall because it had been so hot and she so miserably uncomfortable.
+
+Sissy had begun the second part, the changing bass of which had been
+poor Split's _pons asinorum_. It was the part to which Sissy had always
+given a dramatic touch--partly because, it being simpler music than she
+was accustomed to, she could safely do so, and partly because it
+irritated Irene, to whom the most forthright interpretation was
+difficult. Her foot slipped now, through force of habit, upon the hard
+pedal, and in a moment she heard the whirring of Aunt Anne's skirts.
+
+"Sissy, are you crazy, you--" she heard behind her, and then there came
+a sudden, an unaccountable stop.
+
+Sissy turned. Behind and above Miss Madigan towered tall old Dr.
+Murchison. He had come back, as usual, up the long flight of steps, for
+his forgotten spectacles. One of his hands was clapped with good-humored
+firmness over the lady's mouth; the other was pointing to Split,
+sleeping like a Madigan again, while over Aunt Anne's head the doctor
+nodded and bobbed encouragingly to Sissy, like a benignant musical
+conductor deprived of the use of his arms.
+
+Sissy turned again to the piano. It was a beautiful opportunity for her
+to affect disgust with the situation; to register a silent, but
+expressive, exception to being compelled to entertain Irene; and to
+pose, not only before her aunt but before the doctor, too, as a very
+important personage, whose services were in urgent demand, and who
+yielded under protest. But as a matter of fact she was too happy. There
+was no misconceiving the light that illumined the doctor's round, rosy
+face. Something her undisciplined, childish imagination had been
+coquetting with, as an untried experience, though never admitting its
+full, dread significance, was carried out of her horizon by the shining
+look of success in old Murchison's face; something that shook her strong
+little body with a long shiver, as she realized, in the second when she
+could almost feel the lift of its dark wings taking flight, the thing
+that might have been.
+
+So Sissy played "In Sweet Dreams" "with expression."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Later she played it, and over and over again, with the salt tears
+trickling down her nose and splashing on the keys; played it with tired,
+fat fingers and a rebellious, burning heart. But this was during Split's
+convalescence--a reign of terror for the whole household; for to the
+natural taste she possessed for bullying, Split Madigan then added the
+whims and caprices of the invalid, who uses her weaknesses as a cat of a
+hundred tails with which to scourge her victims into compliance.
+
+She was loath to get well, this tyrannical, hot-tempered, short-haired
+Zingara, who led her people such a merry dance, and she left the
+self-indulgent land of convalescence and the bed in the big back room
+with regret.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHUT-UPS
+
+
+It was an early-morning rite practised by the twins, its performance
+hidden from everybody but each other, to see whether Dr. Murchison's
+prophecy had come true.
+
+"There were once two little girls--twins," began the old doctor,
+significantly, the day Bep and Fom were vaccinated, after battling
+desperately against precedence, in the doctor's very office. "Now all
+twins love each other dearly."
+
+The twins looked at him pityingly. To be so old and so ignorant!
+
+"Yes, they do," he insisted. "Everybody knows they're fonder of each
+other than the closest sisters."
+
+Bep glanced at Fom and Fom looked at Bep; there was something almost
+Chinese in the irony of their eyes; they knew just how fond of each
+other sisters can be! But they politely suppressed their incredulous
+grins.
+
+"Well," resumed the old doctor, realizing how lacking in conviction his
+comparison might seem to a Madigan, "well, these twins were the
+exception: they did not love each other."
+
+There was an interested movement from Bep.
+
+"They hated each other."
+
+Fom looked up eagerly; there was something human about such a tale. She
+felt her respect for Dr. Murchison reviving.
+
+"They fought from morning till night. There was never a moment's peace
+when the two were together. Each was so jealous of the other that she
+would rather do without, herself, than share with her twin. It was
+disgraceful."
+
+The twins leaned forward, charmed.
+
+The doctor looked over his spectacles at them; there was no mistaking
+the effect he had produced. "Everybody warned them that unless they
+stopped squabbling, something dreadful would happen to them. But they
+never believed it till one day--"
+
+The twins held their breath. Dr. Murchison went to the library and took
+out a book. He knew the value of a dramatic pause.
+
+"--till one day they waked up in the morning and found that they
+were--stuck--fast--together--for life! Everything the dark one had she
+just had to share with her twin. And everywhere she went her lazy blonde
+sister had to go, too. People made up a terrible name for them. They
+called them"--he lowered his voice to the apologetic tone one has for
+not quite proper subjects--"the 'Siamese Twins,' and--if you don't
+believe me, here's their picture!" With a quick movement he opened the
+book before them.
+
+The twins' faces went gray; in that second they even looked alike, so
+tense were both with the same emotion. Instinctively they made a swift
+motion, a dumb prayer for sympathy, toward each other; then as swiftly
+shuddered apart as though temporary contact might become lifelong
+bondage.
+
+But as the months went by and they remained mercifully unattached
+(though battling still in their double capacity of Madigans and twins),
+they almost outgrew their credulity; yet still, on occasions, observed
+the morning ceremony of self-inspection.
+
+In fact, though, nothing held them in peace together except sleep, when
+nature must have reunited them in dreams; for, no matter in what
+positions they were relatively when they closed their eyes, morning
+found their arms about each other, their breath intermingled, their
+little bodies intercurved like well-packed sardines.
+
+On their birthday morning--the twins were born on Christmas--Fom waked
+very early, alarmed to find Bep's arm about her. She never remembered in
+the morning that at night her last hazy thought had been to reach for
+it, pull down the sleeve of its nightgown, and cuddle close to her twin.
+She threw it from her now with unusual violence, and, sitting up in bed,
+slipped off her gown that she might closely examine her right side--the
+side that had been nearest Bep.
+
+The blonde twin woke while this process was going on, and its dread
+significance shook the haze of slumber from her eyes. She, too, slipped
+her gown from her shoulders and, shivering with the cold, passed an
+apprehensive hand along her left ribs.
+
+"Do you?" she whispered.
+
+"N-no. I don't think so. I--I dreamed that it was there, though. Do
+you?"
+
+An assenting shudder shook Bep's body.
+
+"Where--oh, where? I don't believe it!" cried Fom. "You're just a
+'fraid-cat trying to frighten me."
+
+Bep pointed to her side. There it was unmistakably--a round
+black-and-blue mark.
+
+A wail escaped Florence. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she cried, "what in the
+world shall we do?"
+
+Bep did not answer. She sat stupefied, staring at the evidence of
+calamity.
+
+"If it's commenced on you, it's bound to commence on me before long. I
+wonder--how fast it grows?"
+
+Bep shook her head. "It wasn't there when I went to sleep."
+
+"If it grows on you toward me, and on me toward you that quick, why, in
+a week--we'll be--stuck fast--won't we?"
+
+Bep nodded miserably.
+
+"Some morning," mourned Fom, wriggling unhappily, "we'll wake and it'll
+be all done. You'll just have to study hard, Bessie Madigan, and be in
+my class in school; I won't go back into the mixed primary--I just
+won't! Oh, Bep, why will you put your arm around me at night?"
+
+"I don't. I always go to sleep with my back to you. You know I do. And
+in the morning, the first thing I know you're flinging my arm off. I
+believe you pull my arm over you yourself. I believe you want to get
+stuck together and be Chemise Twins!" Bep scolded tearfully, with her
+usual ill luck with unfamiliar words.
+
+There was a sorrow-smitten pause.
+
+"I say, Beppy," the termination was a sign of sudden good humor in Fom,
+"didn't you tumble down yesterday when you and Bombey Forrest were
+driving the Grayson kids round the block in your relay race?"
+
+The light of hope leaped up in Bessie's eyes. "Could it be that?"
+
+"Of course it could; it is, you silly!"
+
+"I'm not a silly. You were scared yourself," retorted the blonde twin,
+relieved but pugnacious.
+
+"Pooh! I only pretended, to frighten you," jeered Fom.
+
+"Not much you didn't. I ain't anybody's dope."
+
+"Anybody's what?"
+
+"Anybody's dope," answered Bep, uncertainly; she knew how little words
+were to be trusted.
+
+"What's 'dope'?" demanded Florence.
+
+"Why--what Kate said yesterday."
+
+An enjoying giggle came from Sissy's bed. She had waked. "_Dupe_, you
+goosy--_dupe_!" she chuckled.
+
+"Yah! Yah!" sneered Fom, happy in her twin's discomfiture.
+
+Bep blushed with mortification. "Don't you trophy over me, Fom
+Madigan!" she cried wrathfully.
+
+Sissy's giggle became a shout of laughter, and straightway she sallied
+forth, benightgowned as she was, to carry the news of Bep's latest to
+the Madigans--while Bep, aware that she had Partingtoned again, without
+knowing just how, cried furiously after her: "I didn't say it! I
+didn't!"
+
+Bep's talent was dear to the Madigans. They seized upon each blunder she
+made, and held it up, shrinking and bare, under the light of their
+laughter-loving eyes. They ridiculed it interminably, and were
+unflaggingly entertained by it, repeating it for the edification of each
+new-comer so often and so faithfully that from conscious mimicry they
+turned to use of it without quotation-marks, till, insensibly, at last
+it was received into their vocabulary--which fact, by the way, made the
+Madigan dialect at times difficult for strangers to master.
+
+For instance, the rare rainy days in Nevada were always "glummy" among
+Madigans, because the blonde twin had once been so affected by their
+gloom that she spelled it that way. An over-credulous person was a
+"sucher" since the day she had written it so. Jack Cody lived in the
+"vikinty" of their house, because Bep Partington had so decreed. "Don't
+greed" had become a classic since the day Aunt Anne issued her infamous
+ukase, compelling that twin who (wilfully speculating upon her sister's
+envy) kept goodies to the last to divide said last precious morsel with
+the gloating other. And the Madigan who (taking base advantage of the
+fact that Bep was at an age when to bite into a hard red winter apple
+was to leave a shaky tooth behind) obligingly took the first bite, but
+made that bite include nearly half the apple--that rapacious betrayer of
+confiding helplessness deserved to be called a harpy. But she wasn't;
+she was known as "a regular harper!"
+
+The Madigans trooped back into the twins' room in a body to "trophy"
+over Bep, whose double misfortune it was not only to be a Partington,
+but to strenuously deny her kinship with the family of that name. Bessie
+Madigan could not be got to admit that she had ever misused a word. And
+though the expressions she coined became part of Madigan history, though
+each piece was stamped undeniably by poor Bep her awkward mark, she
+never ceased insisting that they were counterfeit, issued for the
+express purpose of discrediting her well-known familiarity with elegant
+English.
+
+Yet she it was who had first miscalled her shadow a "shabby"; who had
+asked to be "merinded to merember," like her absent-minded Aunt Anne;
+and who had unconsciously parodied Split's passionate rendering of a
+line of the old song, "I feel his presence near" into "I feel his
+pleasant sneer"!
+
+It was rarely that the Madigans could keep peace among themselves long
+enough to make an onslaught in a body. But when they did, the lone
+victim of their attack knew better than to struggle against her fate.
+Poor Bep, her protests borne down, all her old sins of diction raked up
+and, joined to the new ones, marshaled against her, became sulky. She
+turned her back upon the enemy and retreated to a corner to find out
+what Santa Claus and her own particular patron saint had to offer for
+the double celebration.
+
+There was a dictionary from Kate--an added insult. But, to compensate,
+there was a whole orange from Aunt Anne, a bag of Chinese nuts from
+Wong, and from Split and Sissy (a separate donation from each) an
+undivided half-interest in the white kitten known as Spitfire.
+
+When she had summed up the gifts of the gods to herself, Bep's eyes
+turned quickly to Fom's pile.
+
+There was an assortment of hair-ribbons, more or less the worse for
+wear, from Kate, whose braids were coiled around her head these days.
+(Bep didn't envy her twin these, for the excellent reason that a
+back-comb was all that was necessary to keep her short blonde hair in
+order.) Then there was, from Sissy, a pen-wiper, whose cruelly twisted
+shape was a reflection of that needlewoman's agonies in its composition;
+upon it were embroidered figures and colors of things never seen on sea
+or land. (Fom might have that.) From Split--but Bep knew, of course,
+what there was from Split. Every year regularly, since the second of the
+Madigans had put away childish things, she had bestowed upon her
+faithful retainer her favorite doll Dora,--the large one, with waxen
+head and dark-brown tresses,--only to take it back at the first symptom
+of revolt, for a caprice, or merely to feel her power. She was an Indian
+giver, was Split. (Fom might have Dora, Bep said to herself, as long as
+she could keep her.)
+
+But then Fom, too, had a large, fair, yellow orange and a bag of strange
+candies from Chinatown. As to these ...
+
+The twins must be pardoned, but circumstances had soured them. They had
+been cheated out of either a birthday or a Christmas--they had not
+decided which was the crueler wrong, so had not yet adopted and
+proclaimed their grievance. Besides this sorrow, each, by an interfering
+and unprovoked intrusion, had defrauded the other of the child's
+inalienable right to the center of the stage at least once a year. And
+when one remembers how crowded was the Madigan stage with jealous
+performers, any actor at all desirous of an opportunity must sympathize
+with them.
+
+It was not etiquette for the twins to remember each other's birthday
+with a gift, one reason being that they were incapable of such a piece
+of hypocrisy. Another was that it would have seemed too like the rigid
+reciprocity of the Misses Blind-Staggers, whom it had been their custom
+to parody since the day they had been invited down to the cottage to see
+those ladies' strictly mutual Christmas presents. They played "From
+Maude to Etta" and "From Etta to Maude," as they called it; Fom handing
+to Bep, with great ceremony, a shoe, a stocking, or any other thing
+traveling in pairs, with the legend "From Maude to Etta," and receiving
+in return the mate of said shoe or stocking, "From Etta to Maude."
+
+As for Francis Madigan, his daughters appreciated the fact that a girl's
+birthday could be looked upon only as a day of wrath and mourning; it
+came to be considered delicate, therefore, to mention the matter in his
+presence. Christmas, of course, was "nonsense"--a blanket term of
+disapproval behind which no one peered for reasons for its application.
+
+On Miss Madigan anniversaries acted as a stimulant to an already
+sufficiently fecund pen. They awakened in her that sense of
+responsibility for her nieces' future, which nothing but an
+exceptionally heartrending letter of appeal for financial assistance for
+them could put comfortably to sleep again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out in the woodshed a disemboweled chest of drawers had been turned into
+an apartment-house for dolls. All the dolls that had dwelt in the
+Madigan family since Kate's babyhood (with the exception of Split's
+Dora, whom Fom, according to the preordained penchant of mothers, loved
+best because for her sake she suffered most) had descended to the twins.
+
+On the top floor Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair lived with her husband and an
+only daughter. Mrs. Clair was an elegant matron, quite new, a small
+blonde who could turn her head. Florence's skilful fingers kept this
+lady most beautifully gowned. And Split--whose favorite of the small-fry
+dolls she had once been--still remembered her fondly, and passed over to
+Fom the most wonderful patches. These she got from Jack Cody, the
+washerwoman's son, who bribed his mother by promises of good conduct to
+beg samples of their gowns from her aristocratic patrons.
+
+Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair was an unfortunate gentleman, tall,
+low-spirited, loose-jointed, with fixed blue eyes and knobby black hair.
+His melancholy, Bep was assured, was due to two things--the superiority
+of his wife in the matter of a movable head, and the impossibility of
+ever getting a pair of trousers that would come near to him in the seat
+and stay away from him at the ankle. Fom's theory--a hypothesis that
+enraged Bep--was that Mrs. Guy St. Gerald was the wealthy member of the
+family, and that her husband basely envied her her good fortune. She had
+a way, had Fom, of carrying on imaginary conversations with Mr. Clair
+upholding this idea, which made her twin long to rend her, and the doll
+too, limb from limb.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Clair! Yes, thank you. Mrs. Clair not in?... I'm sorry. Gone
+off to Newport, has she, to sell her marble palace? What about the one
+on Fifth Avenue?... You don't say! Making it bigger? Well, well! And
+made a million in stocks, too. How delightful! You wish that you had
+some money--yes, I suppose--"
+
+"He does not! He does not!" The interruption came fiercely from Bep.
+"You talk to your own doll and leave mine alone."
+
+"Pouf! If you're afraid he'll tell me how poor he is--"
+
+"He ain't poor."
+
+"What does he wear such trousers for, then? Tell me that!"
+
+Bep looked unutterable things at her twin. "Just you make men's clothes
+for a while, Fom Madigan, and see how 't is yourself!" she cried.
+
+"Put Mrs. Clair in men's clothes?" demanded Fom, purposely
+misunderstanding. "I'd like to see myself! The very richest lady in New
+York in men's clothes--why, you could get arrested for that!"
+
+"I'll change--" began Bep, quickly.
+
+"No, thank you. You couldn't suit Mrs. Clair. She's that particular
+about her things!"
+
+"Well, just the same, I won't make men's clothes any more." Bep rolled
+her head threateningly.
+
+"Going to let Mr. Clair go naked?" inquired Fom, pleasantly. "He'll have
+to be sent to the poorhouse, then."
+
+"He sha'n't! He'll go to bed sick first, and then Mrs. Clair'll just
+have to stay home in an old wrapper and nurse him."
+
+"No; she'll take Anita and go off to the country.... Are you so sick,
+Mr. Clair?" began Fom, while her slower twin danced with apprehension of
+the outcome of this one-sided dialogue. "I'm awful sorry. Smallpox? Oh,
+how dreadful! And that's why Mrs. Clair and Anita have gone--"
+
+"'T ain't! 'T ain't smallpox! 'T ain't! 'T ain't! 'T ain't!" Bep hopped
+about on one foot in her excitement.
+
+"How do you know?" asked Fom, calmly. "Are you the doctor?"
+
+The doctor lived in the flat below. He was a ready-dressed gentleman,
+still stylish if a bit seedy, and his large family overflowed down into
+the next two shelves. He was summoned.
+
+"I have called you, doctor,"--began Fom.
+
+"I've sent for you, doctor,"--interrupted Bep.
+
+"Well!" exclaimed Fom, stiffly, "I think you might be polite enough to
+let Mrs. Clair speak to the doctor about her own husband."
+
+"What's she going to say?" demanded Bep.
+
+"How should I know?" asked Fom, airily; and then, hurrying on, while she
+made Mrs. Clair bow low before the ready-made physician, "I am Mrs.
+Clair, doctor, the rich Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair who has all the
+money--"
+
+"It's no such thing! It's no such thing!" shrieked Bep.
+
+"Well, Miss Florence Madigan!" exclaimed Mrs. Clair by proxy, "if your
+sister Bessie ain't the rudest!"
+
+"I'll smash her if she says that again!" came in a bellow from Bep.
+
+"You touch my doll!" Daringly Fom placed Mrs. Clair within tempting
+distance of Bep's hand.
+
+"Well--just you let her say it again!"
+
+"I don't need to. She's told me, so now I know it."
+
+"You may go down-stairs again, doctor. It's a mistake," said Bep,
+addressing the medical man. (The twins always tried to keep up
+appearances before their dolls.) "Mr. Clair--the awfully rich Mr. Guy
+St. Gerald Clair--is not sick at all. But you can send your bill to him
+anyway, he won't care. It must have been some poor relation of Mrs.
+Clair's--she didn't have a dress to her name before she married, you
+know."
+
+"Oh--oh! Bessie Madigan!"
+
+"Well, she didn't," said Bep, stoutly.
+
+"I'll bet you--I'll bet you a shut-up. There!" Cautious Fom rarely
+hazarded so great a stake; but she felt that the occasion demanded
+something adequate.
+
+"All right; I'll leave it to Sissy." It was from Sissy that Bep had
+inherited Mr. Clair. She would know.
+
+Laying down stiff all-china Anita Clair, whose shoes she was painting
+red to match her sash, Bep followed her twin into the house.
+
+But the omnivorous Sissy was reading "The Boys of England"--a thing
+Sissy loved to do; for it was a magazine not permitted to enter Mrs.
+Pemberton's immaculate house, a recommendation in itself, and, besides,
+Split, to whom Jack Cody had loaned it, was doubtless looking all over
+for it at this very moment. Lying luxuriously flat upon the floor and
+eating chocolate, Sissy had just got to that part where Jack Harkaway
+"with one flash of Abu Hadji's ruby-incrusted simitar decapitated the
+unfortunate Arab, and Dick Lightheart, seizing the bewitching Haidee,
+had mounted his horse"--when the belligerent twins found her.
+
+"Now, let me say it," began Fom.
+
+"No; you won't ask it fair.... Sissy, tell me, wasn't Mr.--"
+
+"Tra--la--la--la!" sang Fom, shrilly, drowning Bep's voice.
+
+"Say!" Sissy looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any
+bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could
+not. At eleven she shivered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a
+tragedy in the mine--whose tall chimneys she could see from her
+window--was as intangibly distant and irrelevant as weekly statistics of
+the superintendent's mining reports.
+
+Her juniors harkened respectfully; but neither would permit the other to
+ask the question, for fear of its revealing the nature of the answer
+hoped for. So they withdrew for a period, returning with the following
+query, which Bep allowed Fom to put, so sure was she of the response:
+
+"Did or did not Mrs. Clair ever have a dress before she married Mr.
+Clair?"
+
+To this the oracle gave answer:
+
+She did not, for how could she, she being Mr. Clair's second wife; his
+first, an accomplished lady, but all-solid china, having fallen from
+the top story of the apartment-house and smashed herself into bits, and
+the widower having himself accompanied Sissy and Split to the shop to
+select her successor, whose first gown was, of course, a heavy mourning
+robe.
+
+Bep heaved a deep sigh of content. She ran back to the woodshed so
+relieved that, although she had won a valuable shut-up, she did not care
+to "trophy" in her victory. Fom followed. But her grief for Mrs. Clair
+was bitterer even than her own disappointment.
+
+"I want the Smith twins," she said stiffly, when they got back to the
+dolls' sky-scraper. And Bep understood.
+
+The Smith twins were an invention of technical Fom's that had become an
+institution with herself and her playmate. Two tiny china dolls dressed
+in baby long clothes (the better to hide the fact that they were
+legless), the one with pink, the other with a blue sash, were brought up
+from the lowest story, where broken-nosed Mrs. Smith lived with her
+family of cripples.
+
+They were dolls of bad omen, these two, but following instead of
+prophesying a storm. When it became absolutely necessary for one Madigan
+twin to be "mad" at the other, and yet that the business of playing be
+uninterrupted, the Smith twins invariably made their appearance. They
+were supposed to save one's dignity; in reality, they lent piquancy to
+games and rendered "making up" delightful.
+
+Occasionally Bep and Fom did disown each other and adopt a chum from the
+outside world. One Beulah, known as "Bombey," Forrest was always ready
+obligingly to serve either or both of them in the capacity of dearest
+friend. But other playmates were tame after being accustomed to a
+Madigan; and each twin was so jealously afraid of the other's having a
+good time without her that she spent most of the period of estrangement
+trying to spy out what the other and her interloping companion were
+doing.
+
+The Smith twins were easier.
+
+"Tell Bep," said Florence to the pink-sashed small Smith, "that I think
+she's a nasty mean thing, and Mrs. Clair'll never forgive her."
+
+"Tell Fom," returned Bep, with spirit, putting the blue-sashed Smith
+baby in her pocket as a sort of emergency battery, so that the wires of
+communication might be set up at any time between her twin and herself,
+"that I don't care a 'article for what she thinks. And Mrs. Clair's
+nothing but a beggar. I wonder that Mr. Clair married her!"
+
+The war was on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Down on the dump, that fascinating mountain of soft, glittering waste
+rock, the godless twins went to dig on Christmas afternoon. The mining
+operations were elaborate that they projected there, particularly after
+Jack Cody's brother Peter joined them. While Peter was rigging up
+windlasses with pieced-out cord, Fom, with a couple of tin cups
+purloined from Wong's kitchen, brought up the rock, piling it in
+miniature dumps at the mouth of their shaft. Bep's awkward fingers could
+be trusted only with the preliminary scooping out of the ground where a
+new shaft was to be sunk.
+
+"Tell Fom," she said to the blue-sashed Smith twin in her pocket, "that
+I want the scooper; my hands are all sore."
+
+"Tell Bep," returned Fom, quickly, "that she can't have it till Pete an'
+I get through running our drift."
+
+The excuse did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to
+the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart
+for the "scooper"--a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so
+fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore by hand.
+
+But Fom was slim, and quick as a cat. She threw herself bodily upon both
+scooper and pick--the latter an old fork with but one tine left. Bep
+promptly threw herself on top of her twin, while Peter, a laconic lad,
+calmly set himself to rehabilitating the hind wheel of a battered tin
+toy express which served as a dump-cart.
+
+"Little folks shouldn't quarrel," suddenly said a slow voice above the
+struggling arms and legs of the twins.
+
+Fom looked up, still pressing her body hard against the tools in
+dispute, while Bep got to her feet, red-faced and panting. "We're not
+quarreling," said Florence, calmly.
+
+Superintendent Warren Pemberton, still in his oilskins from a trip down
+the mine, looked down at her and gasped. He did not know the Madigan
+brunette twin, and actually thought she was lying. But Fom was never
+known to lie; she only pettifogged.
+
+"You're not quarreling!"
+
+"Nope."
+
+"Didn't I see you with my own eyes?" he demanded, piqued.
+
+"People don't see people quarreling," said Fom, didactically. "They hear
+them."
+
+"Oh, that's it! Well, didn't I hear--"
+
+"No, you didn't; for we're mad and don't speak to each other."
+
+"But you're not quarreling?"
+
+"Nope," repeated Fom, stoutly, "we're not."
+
+Mr. Pemberton shook his head helplessly. "What are you doing?"
+
+"I'm running a drift"--Fom misunderstood the drift of his
+question--"from the Silver King to the Diamond Heart, and the earth
+keeps coming down. Then Bep tries to make it harder by grabbing for the
+tools and--"
+
+"Why don't you timber?" suggested Pemberton, gravely.
+
+"'Cause I don't have to," answered Fom, quite as seriously.
+
+"Oh, you don't!" Pemberton, a man with no sense of humor, had been
+unusually expansive; but he shrank angrily into himself now, as though
+from a cold douche. It took some time for one to get accustomed to Fom's
+way of instructing authorities upon the subjects which they were
+supposed to know most about.
+
+"No, that's silly," remarked Fom, superbly. "If the ground's sticky
+enough, and you're not butter-fingered,"--with an insulting glance at
+Bep,--"you can manage all right."
+
+"But I'm not butter-fingered and I always timber." Warren Pemberton was
+a slow man, but a dogged one; the elusiveness of this pert child
+irritated him.
+
+"That's 'cause you don't know any better," came from the expert, who had
+returned to her task, the excited flourishes of her uplifted legs
+betraying its difficulties.
+
+"You're a little fool!" declared the superintendent. "Do you know who I
+am? My name's Pemberton, and I--"
+
+"Why don't you make your wife leave Crosby alone, then?" demanded Fom,
+without seeming much impressed.
+
+Warren Pemberton looked down upon her little body with an expression
+that made Bep wonder why he refrained from stamping upon it.
+
+"You don't think Mrs. Pemberton knows her business, either?" His ruddy,
+full face looked apoplectic.
+
+"Nope. Sissy says if she was Crosby she'd run away to sea. And she's
+going to put him up to it, too, if--"
+
+But Bep, frightened by the growing anger in the great man's face,
+interposed. "Shall I shut her up for you, Mr. Pemberton?" she asked.
+
+"What--what d' ye say? I wish to God you would, or that somebody could!"
+
+"Fom," said Bep, authoritatively, "shut up!"
+
+Fom jumped to her feet. There was appeal, wrath, rebellion in her
+crimson face. She opened her lips as if to protest.
+
+"Shut up, Fom," repeated Bep, distinctly. "I said _shut up_."
+
+There came a deadly silence. Pemberton, in the act of stalking
+ill-temperedly away, turned bewildered to regard the miracle.
+
+"Say," asked Peter Cody, driven to speech by curiosity. "Say, Fom, do
+you let your sister boss you like that? I thought you was twins."
+
+Fom looked appealingly at Bep. If Bep would but explain the nature of a
+shut-up--its power of suddenly depriving one of speech; of making one
+temporarily dumb in the very midst of a sentence, at the bidding of the
+winner of a wager, whenever, wherever the caprice to collect the debt of
+honor occurred to her!
+
+But Bep, after accompanying Mr. Pemberton a few steps, striving to
+untell him what Fom had betrayed, turned her attention again to mining
+matters. She knew well what Fom's eyes begged, but hid her head in the
+Silver King, whence a subterranean giggle came, revealing her enjoyment
+of the situation.
+
+Fom's stormy eyes filled and the Silver King and the Diamond Heart
+jigged back and forth till the tears splashed down and cleared her
+vision.
+
+"Ho--cry-baby!" called Peter Cody. Peter was one of those gallant
+gentlemen who are never afraid of a playmate when some one else has
+demonstrated that he can be downed.
+
+At the taunt, a revengeful passion seized Fom, standing there--a lingual
+Samson shorn of her tongue, two dirty channels plowed down her cheeks by
+her tears. Deliberately lifting her foot, she brought it down, stamping
+with all her might again and again.
+
+The soft, loosely packed earth slid smoothly down. The Diamond Heart
+caved in completely, the almost finished connecting tunnel was a wreck,
+and the still rolling, moist gravel swept over Bep's head, filling up
+the Silver King clear to the surface.
+
+By the time Peter had realized their utter ruin, and Bep had shaken the
+particles of sand and gravel from her hair and ears and throat, Fom was
+nowhere in sight.
+
+"Let's kill her," suggested Bep.
+
+"Shall we?" asked Peter, with an air of stern justice.
+
+They debated the question, fully realizing the make-believe of it, yet
+taking pleasure in at least the mention of revenge.
+
+Suddenly Bep gave a cry of triumph and picked up something from the
+ground.
+
+"What is it?" asked Peter.
+
+"It's Fom's doll. It must have dropped out of her pocket when she was
+digging and sassing Mr. Pemberton. We'll play there's been an
+accident,--a cave in the mine,--and the doll'll be buried alive down
+there. Wouldn't Fom howl?"
+
+She rolled up her sleeve and thrust a round arm far down in the clean,
+moist gravel, leaving the poor Smith twin in the murderous depths of the
+Silver King. Then both set to work. Poor Fom, half-way down the dump,
+beside the mysterious "flush" of seething, boiling, foaming waste water,
+whose tide went low or high with the breathing of the great mine, heard
+a laugh or a whistle now and then; and a miserable feeling of loneliness
+oppressed her. But she lay there sobbing quietly, while on top the
+valiant rescuers emptied the mines, carried on conversations with the
+entombed men, and at last, with a fine pretense of amazement and grief,
+discovered the dead miner. Reverently he was borne to the surface, Bep
+holding the bucket steady while Peter wound the cord. And then they
+buried the unfortunate man. There was an imposing funeral, and the
+three-wheeled dump-cart was filled with imaginary mourners. At the grave
+hymns were sung by Bep, when she could be spared from mourner's duties,
+and a prayer by Peter concluded the impressive services.
+
+It had been Fom's intention to lie there half-way down the dump till she
+died of hunger--when Bep would be sorry for her cruel treatment. The
+self-pitying tears were in Florence's eyes as she thought out the
+details of Bep's grief, and the unanimous reprobation of the family for
+the bad blonde twin. But she grew hungrier and hungrier, and at last
+resolved to go home to lunch.
+
+First, though, she would see how much damage she had done in her
+short-lived anger, for her heart was sore when she thought how proud
+they two had been of their mines. She scrambled to the top. There was
+the new shaft, the Tomboy, almost completed. The Diamond Heart was in
+working order. Peter's dexterous fingers had triumphed over the
+shifting rock, and he had modestly taken a hint as to timbering from
+Warren Pemberton. The tunnel was an accomplished fact, while over the
+frail hoisting-works of the Silver King a tiny flag--a corner torn from
+Bep's handkerchief--fluttered at half-mast.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCESTRY OF IRENE
+
+
+In her heart Irene was confident that, though among the Madigans, she
+was not of them. The color of her hair, the shape of her nose, the
+tempestuousness of her disposition, the difficulty she experienced in
+fitting her restless and encroaching nature into what was merely one of
+a number of jealously frontiered interstices in a large family--all this
+forbade tame acceptance on her part of so ordinary and humble an origin
+as Francis Madigan's fatherhood connoted.
+
+"No," she said firmly to herself the day she and Florence were
+see-sawing in front of the woodshed after school, "he's only just my
+foster-father; that's all."
+
+How this foster-father--she loved the term, it sounded so delightfully
+haughty--had obtained possession of one whose birthright would place her
+in a station so far above his own, she had not decided. But she was
+convinced that, although poor and peculiar and incapable of
+comprehending the temperament and necessities of the nobly born, he was,
+in his limited way, a worthy fellow. And she had long ago resolved that
+when her real father came for her, she would bend graciously and
+forgivingly down from her seat in the carriage, to say good-by to poor
+old Madigan.
+
+"Thank you very, very much, Mr. Madigan," she would sweetly say, "for
+all your care. My father, the Count, will never forget what you have
+done for his only child. As for myself, I promise you that I will have
+an eye upon your little girls. I am sure his Grace the Duke will gladly
+do anything for them that I recommend. I am very much interested in
+little Florence, and shall certainly come for her some day in my golden
+chariot to take her to my castle for a visit, because she is such a
+well-behaved child and knew me, in her childish way, for a noble lady in
+disguise. Cecilia? Which one is that? Oh, the one her sisters call
+Sissy! She needs disciplining sadly, Mr. Madigan, sadly. Much as he
+loves me, my father, the Prince, would not care to have me know her--as
+she is now. But she will improve, if you will be very, very strict with
+her. Good-by! Good-by, all! No, I shall not forget you. Be good and obey
+your aunty. Good-by!"
+
+The milk-white steeds would fly down the steep, narrow, unpaved streets.
+On each side would stand the miners, bowing, hat in hand, hurrahing for
+the great Emperor and his beautiful daughter--she who had so strangely
+lived among them under the name of Split Madigan. They would speak,
+realizing now, of certain royal traits they had always noted in her--her
+haughty spirit that never brooked an insult, her independence, her utter
+fearlessness, the reckless bravery of a long line of kings, and--and
+even that very disinclination for study which they had stupidly fancied
+indicated that Sissy Madigan was her superior! What would Princess Irene
+want with vulgar fractions, a common denominator, and such low subjects?
+
+"What makes you wrinkle up your nose that way, Split?" Florence's voice
+broke in complainingly on her sister's reverie. She glanced up the
+incline of the see-saw to the height whence Irene looked down,
+physically as well as socially, upon her faithful retainer and the
+straggling little town.
+
+Irene did not answer. She was busy dreaming, and her dreams were of the
+turned-up-nose variety.
+
+"Don't, Split! It makes you look like a--what Sissy just now called
+you." The smaller sister's eyes fell, as though seeking corroboration
+from the middle of the board, where Sissy had been so lately acting as
+"candle-stick"--lately, for the incident had ended (no game being
+enticing enough to hold these two long in an unnatural state of
+neutrality) in Split's washing Sissy's face vigorously in the snow, and
+Sissy's calling her elder sister "nothing but an old Indian!" as she ran
+weeping into the house with the familiar parting threat to get even
+before bedtime. No Madigan could bear that the sun should set on her
+wrath; she preferred that all scores should be paid off, so that the
+slate might be clean for to-morrow's reckonings.
+
+"Fom," said her big sister, slowly, when she was quite ready to speak,
+"I think you'd better call me 'Irene.' You'd feel gladder about it when
+I'm gone."
+
+"Where?" At this minute it was Fom's turn to be dangerously high, and
+she wriggled to the uttermost end of the plank to counterbalance her
+sister's weight.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "She glanced up the incline of the see-saw to the height
+      whence Irene looked down"]
+
+A mysterious smile overspread Irene's face. It became broadly triumphant
+as she rose presently on the short end of the board, her arms daringly
+outspread, her toes upturned in front of her, her agile body well
+balanced, her spirit exulting in the sense of danger without and
+superiority within.
+
+"When?" asked Florence, with that amiable readiness to consider a
+question unasked, so becoming to the vassal. "When are you going?"
+
+"To-night--maybe." Her own words startled Irene. She loved to play upon
+Fom's fears, but she had not really intended committing herself so far.
+"He may call for me to-night," she added, with qualifying emphasis.
+
+"Who? Not--not--"
+
+"Yes, my father. I must be ready at any time, you know."
+
+Fom looked alarmed. She had heard long ago and in strict confidence
+about Split's lofty parentage. She had even accepted drafts upon her
+future, rendering services which were unusual in a Madigan fag, with the
+understanding that when the Princess Split should come into her own, she
+would richly repay. But she had never before heard her speak so
+positively or set a time when their relationship must cease.
+
+A feeling of utter loneliness came over Split's faithful ally. She saw
+the balance of power in the Madigan oligarchy rudely disturbed. She
+beheld, in a swift, dread vision, the undisputed supremacy of the party
+of Sissy. Dismay entered her soul and shook her body, for with the
+brunette of the twins emotion and action were synonymous. "Oh, don't go,
+Split!" she begged, squirming unhappily at her end of the plank. "Don't
+go!"
+
+High up in the air, Split smiled superbly. There was _noblesse oblige_
+in that smile; also the strong teasing tincture which no Madigan could
+resist using, even upon her closest ally.
+
+"Oh, Split--o-o-oh, Split!" wailed Fom, forgetting in her wriggling
+misery how close she already was to the end of the plank.
+
+A crash and a bump and a squeal told it to her all at once. She had slid
+clear off, getting an instantaneous effect of her haughty sister
+unsupported at a dizzy eminence, before Split came bumping down to
+earth, the see-saw giving that regal head a parting, stunning tap as the
+long end finally settled down and the short one went up to stay.
+
+It was never in the ethics of Madigan warfare to explain the
+inexplicable. Florence was on her feet, flying as though for her very
+life, before Split, shaken down from her dreams, quite realized what had
+happened. And she was still sitting as she had fallen when Jim, the
+Indian, came for the sawbuck.
+
+Jim limped, his eyes were sore and watery, and it took him two weeks to
+conquer the Madigan woodpile, which any other Piute in town could have
+leveled in half the time.
+
+"Him fall, eh?" he asked, dismantling the see-saw with that careful
+leisureliness that accounted for the Chinaman Wong's contempt for
+Indians.
+
+"Not him; _her_, Jim."
+
+Split possessed a passion for imparting knowledge, of which she had
+little, and which was hard for her to attain.
+
+Jim grinned.
+
+"She no got little gal like you teach her Inglis," he said, gently
+apologetic.
+
+"Not she, Jim; _he_. How old is your little girl?" Split remembered that
+a genteel interest in the lower classes is becoming to the well-born.
+
+"He just big like you," Jim responded mournfully, drawing the back of
+his brown hand across his nose. "But he all gone."
+
+"Dead?" Split crossed her legs uneasily as she squatted, and lowered her
+voice reverently.
+
+"He no dead," Jim said, lifting the sawbuck and easing it on his
+shoulder. "One Washoe squaw steal him--little papoose, nice little
+papoose. Much white--like you, missy. So white, squaw say no sure
+Injun."
+
+"Jim!"
+
+"Take him down Tluckee valley. Take him 'way. Jim see squaw one day long
+time 'go--Washoe Lake--shoot ducks. Heap shoot squaw. He die, but he say
+white Faginia man got papoose."
+
+"Jim!" It was the faintest echo of the first terrified exclamation.
+
+"Come Faginia, look papoose. No find. Chop wood long time. Heap
+hogady--not much dinner. Nice papoose--white, like you."
+
+Jim paused. He expected sympathy, but he hoped for dinner. When he saw
+he was to get neither, he hunched his lame hip; scratched his head,
+balanced the sawbuck, and shuffled away.
+
+Too overcome to move, Split sat looking after him. Her father! This,
+then, was her father! She was dazed, helpless, too overwhelmed even to
+be unhappy yet.
+
+There came a shrill call for her from Kate, and Split, with unaccustomed
+meekness, staggered obediently to her feet. What was left for her but to
+be a slave, she said stonily to herself. She was an Indian like--like
+her father! And Sissy had noticed the resemblance that very afternoon!
+
+"It's the bell, Split," explained Kate, who was reading "The Spanish
+Gypsy" in the low, hall-like library.
+
+She had begun to read the book for the reason that no one in her class
+at school had read it--usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the
+Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had
+whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finishing
+it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her,
+till she should know the end.
+
+"Shall I go?" asked Split, humbly, looking up at her sister.
+
+Kate looked up, too surprised by her sister's docility to do anything
+but nod. She had anticipated a battle, a ring at the door-bell being the
+signal for a flying wedge of Madigans tearing through the hall, with
+inquisitive Irene at its apex--except when she was asked to answer it.
+
+The sisters' eyes met: those of the elder, in her thin, dark, flushed
+face, hazy with romantic happiness; those of the younger bright with
+romantic suffering, demanding a share of that felicity which
+transfigured her senior.
+
+"What're you reading, anyway, Kate?" she asked.
+
+As well tap the bung of a cask and ask what it holds. Kate began
+chanting:
+
+    "'Father, your child is ready! She will not
+    Forsake her kindred: she will brave all scorn
+    Sooner than scorn herself. Let Spaniards all,
+    Christians, Jews, Moors, shoot out the lip and say,
+    "Lo, the first hero in a tribe of thieves!"
+    Is it not written so of them? They, too,
+    Were slaves, lost, wandering, sunk beneath a curse,
+    Till Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were born,
+    Till beings lonely in their greatness lived,
+    And lived to save their people.'"
+
+It poured from Kate's lips, the story of the lady Fedalma and her Gipsy
+father, a stream of winy romance, a sugared impossibility preserved in
+the very spirits of poetry.
+
+Again the old bell jangled, and again. Kate was glutted, drunk with the
+sound of the verbal music that had been chorusing behind her lips; while
+for Irene every word seemed charged with the significance of special
+revelation. The light seemed to leap from her sister's eyes to kindle a
+conflagration in her own.
+
+"Read it again--that part--Kate! Read it!" she cried.
+
+And Kate, not a bit loath, turned the page and repeated:
+
+    "'Lay the young eagle in what nest you will,
+      The cry and swoop of eagles overhead
+      Vibrate prophetic in its kindred frame,
+      And make it spread its wings and poise itself
+      For the eagle's flight.'"
+
+Split breathed again, a full, deep breath of satisfaction. An
+Indian--she, Split Madigan? Perhaps; but an Indian princess, then, with
+a mission as great, glorious, and impossible as Fedalma's own.
+
+When at last she did turn mechanically to answer the bell, she saw that
+Sissy had anticipated her and was showing old Professor Trask into the
+parlor. Ordinarily Irene loved to listen at the door while Sissy's
+lesson was in progress; for Trask was a nervous, disappointed wreck,
+whose idea of teaching music seemed to be to make his pupils as much
+like himself as harried youth can be like worried age. But on this great
+day the joy of hearing the perfect Sissy rated had not the smallest
+place in her enemy's thoughts. A poet's words had lifted Irene in an
+instant from child hell to heaven, had fired her imagination, had
+rekindled her pride, had given back her dreams.
+
+Reality was not altogether so pleasant, she found, when she went into
+the kitchen, skirmished with the Chinese cook for Jim's dinner, and
+went out to the woodpile to give it to him herself.
+
+She did not wait to see him eat it--she was not poet enough for that;
+and, that impersonal, composite father, her tribe, was calling her.
+
+Pulling on her hood and jacket, with her mittens dangling from a red
+tape on each side, she flew out and down the long, rickety stairs which
+a former senator from Nevada had built up the mountain's side, when he
+planned for his home a magnificent view of the mountains and desert off
+toward the east.
+
+Split did not look at either, though they shone, the one like a billowy
+moonlit sea, the other like a lake of silver, because of the snow that
+covered them. She half ran, half slid down the hilly street till she
+came to a box-like miner's cabin, where Jane Cody, the washerwoman,
+lived with her son. In front of it she halted and called imperiously:
+
+"Jack!"
+
+For this same Jack was her own, her discovery, her possession, who
+acknowledged her thrall and was proud of it.
+
+But the green shutters over the one window remained fast, and the door
+tight closed.
+
+"Jack?" There was a suggestion of incredulity in Split's voice.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'I want you--come!' the Indian princess announced"]
+
+The whistles burst forth in a medley of throaty roars (it was
+five-o'clock "mining-time"), but the bird-like whistle of Jack was
+missing.
+
+"Jack Cody!" Split stamped her high arctics in the snow.
+
+The door was opened a little, and a round black head was cautiously
+thrust forth.
+
+"I want you--come!" the Indian princess announced. "And get your sled."
+
+"I can't," replied the head.
+
+"But I want you."
+
+The head wagged dolefully.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+The head hung down.
+
+"Tell me."
+
+The head's negative was sorrowful but determined.
+
+"If you don't tell me I'll--never speak to you again 's long as I live,
+Jack Cody!"
+
+The head stretched out its long neck and sent an agonized glance toward
+her.
+
+"Tell me--right now!" she commanded.
+
+"Well--she's took my clothes with her," wailed the head, and jerked
+itself within, while the door was slammed behind it.
+
+Split walked up the stoop.
+
+"Jack," she called, her mouth at the keyhole, "who took 'em? Your
+mother? Why? But she can't keep you in that way. Never mind. What _have_
+you got on?"
+
+The door was opened an inch or two, and the head started to look out.
+But at sight of Split so near it withdrew in such turtle-like alarm that
+she laughed aloud.
+
+"What're you laughing at?" growled the boy.
+
+"What's that you got on?" said she.
+
+"My--my mother's wrapper."
+
+A peal of laughter burst from the Indian princess. But it ceased
+suddenly. For the door was thrown open with such violence that it made
+Jane Cody's wax flowers shake apprehensively under their glass bell, and
+a figure stalked out such as might haunt a dream--long, gaunt, awkward,
+inescapably boyish, yet absurdly feminine, now that the dark calico
+wrapper flapped at its big, awkward heels and bound and hindered its
+long legs.
+
+Split looked from the heavily shod feet to the round, short-shaven black
+head, and a premonitory giggle shook her.
+
+"Don't you laugh--don't you dare laugh at me! Don't you, Split--will
+you?" The phrases burst from him, a threat at the beginning, an appeal
+at the end.
+
+"No," said Split, choking a bit; "no, I won't. You don't look very--"
+she gulped--"very funny, Jack. And it's getting so dark that nobody'd
+know--really they wouldn't."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+Split nodded.
+
+"Get your sled quick, the big, long one, the leg-breaker, and take me
+down--I'll tell you where. Get it, won't you?"
+
+"In this, this--like this?" Jack faltered.
+
+"It's so important, Jack. Please! It's always you that asks me,
+remember."
+
+The boy threw his hands out with a gesture that strained the narrow
+garment he wore almost to bursting. He began to talk, to argue, to
+plead; then suddenly he yielded, and turned and ran, a grotesque,
+long-legged shape, toward the back of the house.
+
+When he whistled, Split joined him, and together they plowed their way
+through the high snow to the beaten-down street beyond. At the top of
+the hill, Split sat down well to the front of the low, rakish-looking
+leg-breaker. Behind her the boy, hitching up his skirts, threw himself
+with one knee bent beneath him, and, with a skilful ruddering of the
+other long, untrousered leg, started the sled.
+
+They had coasted only half a block--Virginia City runs downhill--when
+they heard the shrill yelp of the Comstock boy on the trail of his prey.
+As Jack stopped the sled a swift volley of snowballs from a cross-street
+struck the figure of a tall, timid, stooping man in an old-fashioned
+cape, such as no Comstock boy had ever seen on anything masculine.
+
+"It's Professor Trask," breathed Irene, keen delight in persecution
+lending to her aggressive, bright face that savage sharpness of feature
+which Sissy Madigan called Indian. "Don't you wish you hadn't got that
+dress on, Jack?" she asked, as the tall, black mark for a good shot
+still stood hesitating to cross the polished, steep street, down which
+many sleds had slipped for days past. "You could get him every time,
+couldn't you?"
+
+Despite the ignoble garment that cramped it, the boy's breast swelled
+with pride in his lady's approval.
+
+"You could just fire one at him from here, anyway," suggested Irene,
+adaptable as her sex is to contemporary standards and customs.
+
+"Ye-es," said the boy, hesitating; "but he's such a poor old luny."
+
+Split turned her imperial little hooded head questioningly.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "They had coasted only half a block"]
+
+"He is--really luny," said the boy, apologetically. "Since his little
+girl wandered away one day from home and never came back, he gets
+spells, you know. He was telling ma one day when she went over to do his
+washing. But--but I will land one on him if you want, Split."
+
+But Split had suddenly pivoted clear around and sat now facing him, an
+eager, mittened hand staying his hard, skilful, obedient fingers,
+already making the snowball.
+
+"How--how old would that little girl be, Jack?" she gasped.
+
+"Why, 'bout twelve--thirteen. Why?"
+
+"And what would be the color of her hair?"
+
+"Red, I s'pose, like his; not--not like yours--Split," he added shyly,
+glancing at the brown fire of the curls that escaped from her hood.
+
+But Irene was no longer listening. She was looking over to the other
+side of the street, where that shrinking, pitiable old figure in its
+threadbare neatness trembled; not daring to seek safety across the
+dangerously smooth street, nor daring to remain exposed here, where it
+ducked ridiculously every now and then to avoid the whizzing balls that
+sang about it.
+
+Irene breathed hard. A coward for a father, a scarecrow, a butt for a
+gang of miners' boys! This, this was her father! Why, even crippled old
+Jim, the wood-chopper, seen in retrospect and haloed by copper-colored
+dreams of romantic rehabilitation--even Jim seemed regrettable.
+
+But she did not hesitate, any more than Fedalma did. She, too, knew a
+daughter's duty--to a hitherto unknown, just-discovered father. A merely
+ordinary, every-day parent like Francis Madigan was, as a matter of
+course, the common enemy, and no self-respecting Madigan would waste the
+poetry of filial feeling upon any one so realistic.
+
+"You wait for me here, Jack," she said, with unhesitating reliance upon
+his obedience.
+
+"Where're you going? I thought you were in a hurry to get down to the
+wickiups."
+
+She did not hear him. She had spun off the sled, and with the
+sure-footed speed of the hill-child she was crossing the street.
+
+Old Trask, his short-sighted eyes blinking beneath his twitching, bushy
+red eyebrows, looked down as upon a miracle when a red-mittened hand
+caught his and he heard a confident voice--the clear voice children use
+to enlighten the stupidity of adults:
+
+"I'll help you across; take my hand."
+
+"Eh--what?"
+
+He leaned down, failing to recognize her. Children had no identity to
+him. They were merely brats, he used to say, unless they happened to
+have some musical aptitude. But he accepted her aid, his battered old
+hat rocking excitedly upon his high bony forehead, as he ducked and
+turned and shivered at the oncoming balls. "Bad boys--bad boys!" he
+ejaculated. "Boys are the devil!"
+
+"Yes," agreed Split, craftily. "Girls are best. Your little girl,
+now--father--" she began softly.
+
+"Eh--what?" he exclaimed. "Who's your father? My respects to him."
+
+"I have no father," she answered softly. A plan had sprung full-born
+from her quick brain. She would win this erratic father back to memory
+of his former life and her place in it--somewhat as did one Lucy
+Manette, a favorite heroine of Split's that Sissy had read about and
+told her of. That would be a fine thing to do--almost as fine, and
+requiring the center of the stage as much, as rehabilitating the Red
+Man.
+
+"I have no father," she murmured, "if you won't be mine."
+
+"What? What? No!" Trask was across now and brushing the snowy traces of
+battle from his queer old cape. "No; I don't want any children. I had
+one once--a daughter."
+
+Split's heart beat fast.
+
+"She was a brat, with the temper of a little fiend, and no
+ear--absolutely none--for music; played like an elephant."
+
+How terribly confirmatory!
+
+"And what--what became of her?" whispered Split.
+
+"She ran away two years ago and--"
+
+"Two years!"
+
+"I said two, didn't I?" demanded the old professor, irascibly.
+
+Disgusted, Split turned her back on him. Why, two years ago Sissy had
+first called her an Indian; how right she had been! Two years ago she,
+Split, was making over all her dolls to Fom. Two years ago she had
+already discovered Jack Cody's fleet strength, his wonderful aptness at
+making swift sleds, in which her reckless spirit reveled, his mastership
+of other boys of his gang, and--her mastery of him.
+
+She turned and beckoned to him. His sweet whistle rang out in answer
+like a vocal salute, and in a moment she was seated again in front of
+him, with that deft, tail-like left leg of his steering them down, down
+over cross-street, through teams and sleighs and unwary pedestrians;
+past the miners coming off shift; past the lamplighter making his rounds
+in the crisp, clear cold of the evening; past the heavy-laden squaws,
+with their bowed heads, their papooses on their backs, their weary arms
+bearing home the spoils of a hard day's work, and the sore-eyed yellow
+dogs trudging, too, wearily and dejectedly at their heels, toward the
+rest of the wickiup and the acrid warmth of the sage-brush camp-fire.
+
+In short, swift sentences, as they hurdled over artificially raised
+obstructions, or slid along the firm-packed snow, or grated on the muddy
+cross-streets, Princess Split told her plan--with reservations. She was
+not prepared to admit to so humble a worshiper the secret of her birth,
+but the magnanimous self-sacrifice of a beautiful nature, the heroine
+concealed beneath a frivolous exterior--these she was willing Jack Cody
+should suspect and admire.
+
+"We'll lift them up, you and I, Jack. I'm going 'to--to be the angel of
+a homeless tribe,' or something like that," she quoted, as it grew
+darker and the sled slowed down a bit, where the slant of the
+hill-street became gentler and she need not hold on tight. "You'll be
+their general and I their princess. You'll teach them to be fine
+soldiers, so that the people in town will be afraid of them and have to
+give them back their lands--and the mines, too. They're theirs, and
+they shall have them and be millionaires. And, of course, so will we.
+We'll own all the stocks and brokers' offices, and after a few years,
+when they're quite civilized, we'll come up to town to live. We'll take
+Bob Graves's 'Castle' and--Jack! Ah!"
+
+A long scream burst from her. Never in her life had Split Madigan
+screamed like that. For an incredibly fleet instant she actually saw
+above her head a struggling horse's hoofs. In the next, her
+calico-wrappered knight had thrown himself and his lady out into the
+great drifts on the side. Split felt the cold fleeciness of new-fallen
+snow on her face, down her neck, up her sleeves. She was smothered,
+drowned in it, when with another tug the boy whirled her to her feet,
+and swaying unsteadily, she looked up into the face of the man whose
+horses had so nearly crushed her life out.
+
+It was her father--she knew it was. Else why had fate so strangely
+thrown them together? Yes, this was her true father. No other girl's
+father could have so handsome a fur coat as that reaching from the tips
+of this very tall man's ears to his heels. No other could have a sleigh
+so fine, and silver-belled horses fit for a king. No other could have
+such bright brown eyes beneath heavy sandy brows, such red, red cheeks,
+and so long and silver-white a beard which the sun could still betray
+into confession of its youthful ruddiness. What if he did have, too, a
+brogue so soft, so wheedling that men had long called him Slippery Uncle
+Sammy?
+
+Split waked with a humiliating start from her lesser, less genteel
+dreams. Of course this bonanza king driving up from the mine was her
+real father, and she a bonanza princess, happier, more fortunate than a
+merely political one; for princesses have to live in Europe, where
+Madigans cannot see and envy them.
+
+With the mien of one who has come at last into her own, Split accepted
+his invitation to carry her up to town, and, with a facetious twinkle in
+his eyes that added to his likeness to a stately Santa Claus (though his
+was not a reputation for benevolence), he lifted her and set her down
+under the silky fur rugs.
+
+Split nestled back in perfect content: at last she was fitly placed.
+
+"Hitch on behind, Jack," she cried patronizingly, and the bonanza king's
+sleigh went up the hill with its queer freight: queer, for this was that
+one of them whose strength was subtlety, whose forte was guile, whose
+left hand knew not the charitable acts of his right--and neither did
+the right, for that matter.
+
+Thoroughly sophisticated are Comstock children as to the character of
+the masters of their masters, and Split Madigan knew how foreign to this
+man's nature a lovable action was. All the more, then, she valued the
+distinction which chance--fate--had made hers. And all the more did a
+something fierce and lawless and proud in herself leap to recognize the
+tyrant in him. Kings should be above law, as princesses were, was
+Split's creed; else why be kings and princesses?
+
+"An' where would ye be a-goin' to, down this part o' the world so late?"
+she heard the unctuous voice above her inquire.
+
+Split was silent. That the daughter of a bonanza king should have
+fancied for a moment that Indian Jim could be her father!
+
+"An' who's the gyurl with ye--the witch ye call Jack?"
+
+"'T isn't a girl." That virility which Split's wild nature respected and
+admired forbade her denying the boy his sex. "It's a boy--Jack--Jack
+Cody."
+
+King Sammy laughed. His was rich, strong laughter, and men who heard it
+on C Street (they had reached the main thoroughfare now, so fleet were
+these kingly horses of Split's father) knew it--and knew, too, what
+poor, mean thoughts lay behind it.
+
+"An' this Cody," he said, turning his handsome head to look down at the
+boy on his sled behind. "Cody--Cody, now," he continued, with royalty's
+marvelous memory, "your father killed in the Ophir--eh? Time of the fire
+on the 1800--yes--yes! An' I was goin' to give him a point that very
+day. Well--well!"
+
+"Ye did!" The boy looked up resentful, and met those smiling, crafty
+eyes.
+
+"No! An' he sold short? Too bad! Too bad! I thought sure that stock was
+goin' down. My, the bad man that told me it was! I hope he didn't lose?"
+he chuckled.
+
+"All we had," said the boy.
+
+"Tut--tut--tut! What a pity! Haven't I always said it's wicked to deal
+in stocks!" The king shook his sorrowful old head, then turned to the
+princess beside him. "An' it's out for a ride ye'd be, sweetheartin' on
+the sly, eh?"
+
+"He's not! I was not!" Split's cheeks grew hotter. He was her father,
+this splendid, handsome king, yet never had she felt for poor Francis
+Madigan what she felt now for the man beside her.
+
+"What, then?"
+
+"I was going down for--for a reason," she stammered.
+
+"To be sure! To be sure!" chuckled his old Majesty. "An' ye've told your
+father an' mother ye were goin', no doubt."
+
+"No, I--didn't. I--couldn't."
+
+"Coorse not; coorse not, but ye--"
+
+"Let me out!" cried Split.
+
+The sneer in his voice had set her aflame. She rose in the sleigh, cast
+off the furs, and, stamping like a fury, tried to seize the reins.
+
+"Ho! Ho!" The old monarch's bowed broad shoulders shook with laughter as
+he caught her trembling hands and held them. "What a little spitfire! A
+divvle of a temper ye've got, my dear. Cody, now, does he like gyurls
+with such a temper?"
+
+"Will you let me out?" Her voice was hoarse with anger.
+
+"Can't ye wait till we get t' a crossin', ye little termagant?"
+
+"No--no!" She tore her hands from him, and, with a quick, lithe leap
+from the low sleigh, landed, a bit dazed, in the snow banked high on the
+side of the street.
+
+Uncle Sammy stared after her a moment. Then he remembered the boy
+behind.
+
+"Hi--there!" he cried, looking over his shoulder as he reached for his
+whip. "Git!"
+
+But Cody had the street-boy's quickness. All he had to do was to let go
+the end of rope he held, and the leg-breaker slipped smoothly back,
+while the king's runnered chariot shot ahead, drawn by the flying horses
+on whose backs the whip had descended.
+
+"Ugh!" shivered Split, as she made her way out of the drift. "It's cold,
+Jack. Let's run."
+
+Together they hauled the leg-breaker up the hill, parting at the
+snow-caked, wandering flights of steps, which seemed weary and worn with
+their endless task of climbing the mountain to Madigan's door.
+
+Irene mounted them quickly. She was cold, and it had grown very dark and
+late; so late that the lamp shone out from the dining-room, warning her
+that it must be dangerously near to dinner-time. She had reached the
+last flight when Sissy came flying out along the porch to meet her.
+
+"Split--ssh!" she cautioned, with a friendliness that surprised Split,
+who remembered how well she had washed that round, innocent face in the
+snow only a few hours ago--the face of Sissy, the unforgiving. "Dinner's
+ready," she went on, "but father isn't down yet. Go round the back way,
+and you can get in without his knowing how late you are."
+
+Split did not budge. The sight of Sissy had made her a Madigan again,
+prepared for any emergency the appearance of her arch-enemy might
+portend. "What are you up to?" she demanded suspiciously.
+
+"Oh!" Sissy turned haughtily on her heel. "If you want to go in and
+catch it--go."
+
+But Split did not want to catch it. Her day's experience had made her
+content to bear the eccentricities of her humble foster-father, but she
+was by no means anxious to be the instrument that should provoke a
+characteristic expression of them.
+
+She slipped around the back way, passing through Wong's big kitchen, the
+heat and odors of which were grateful messages of cheer to her chilled
+little body. She flew up-stairs and tore off her wet clothing, and was
+out in the hall, buttoning hastily as she walked, when the door-bell
+rang.
+
+In some previous existence Split Madigan must have been a most
+intelligent horse in some metropolitan fire department. It was her
+instinct still to run at the sound of the bell; every other Madigan,
+therefore, delighted in preventing that impulse's gratification. But
+this time Bessie came hurriedly to meet her and even speed her on her
+errand.
+
+     [Illustration:
+       "'Oh, you needn't glare at me!' exclaimed Bep"]
+
+"Quick--it's your father, Split!" she cried.
+
+Split looked at her. She trusted Bep no more than she did Sissy, whose
+lieutenant the blonde twin was.
+
+"Oh, you needn't glare at me!" exclaimed Bep, her guilty conscience
+sensitive to accusation by implication. "Fom told me all you told her
+about him. She was 'fraid you were coming after her for letting you fall
+off the see-saw, and she told me the whole thing. She said you expected
+him to-night--don't you?"
+
+"How--do you know it's--my father that's at the door?" demanded Split,
+all the warier of the enemy because of her acquaintance with her secret.
+
+"Why!" Bep opened clear, china-blue eyes, as shallow and baffling as
+bits of porcelain. "Hasn't he been here once for you already, while you
+were out?"
+
+Split turned and ran down the hall. In the minute this took she had
+lived through a long, heart-breaking, childish regret--regret for the
+familiar, apprehension of the unknown. It was so warm and snug in this
+Madigan house; she seemed so to belong there. Why must that unknown
+parent come to claim her just now, when her spirit was still sorely
+vexed with the failings of the various fathers she had borne with in
+one short afternoon!
+
+She got to the top of the staircase that led down to the front door,
+when she saw that some one had preceded her. It was Madigan, who was on
+his way down to dinner; poor old Madigan, with his slippered, slow, but
+positive tread, his straight, assertive back expressing indignation, as
+it always did when his door-bell was rung. Oh, that familiar old back!
+Something swelled in Split's throat and held her choking, as she grasped
+the banister and gazed yearningly down upon him. For a moment she had
+the idea of flying down past him to save him from what was coming. But
+it was too late; already he had his hand on the door-knob. Did he know
+who it was for whom he was opening his door? Split gasped. Did he
+anticipate what was coming? Some one ought to tell him--to break it to
+him--to--
+
+But evidently Split herself could not have done this, for in almost the
+identical moment that Madigan resentfully threw open the door, a stream
+of water was dashed into his astonished face.
+
+From her point of vantage on the stairway Split saw a paralyzed Sissy,
+the empty pitcher in her guilty hand, the grin of satisfaction frozen
+on her panic-stricken round face; while, before she fled, her eyes shot
+one quick, hunted glance over Madigan's dripping head to the joyous
+enemy above.
+
+And Split was joyous. Her explosive laugh pealed out in the second
+before fear of her father stifled it. So this was how Sissy had planned
+to get even; so this was the plot behind Bep's baffling blue eyes! And
+only the accident of Madigan's going to the door had saved Split--and
+confounded her enemy.
+
+Oh, it was good to be a Madigan! Standing there dry and triumphant,
+Split hugged herself--her very own self--her individuality, which at
+this minute she would not have changed for anything the world had to
+offer. To be a Madigan, one's birthright to laugh and do battle with
+one's peers; and to win, sometimes through strength, sometimes through
+guile, sometimes through sheer luck--but to win!
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST STRAW
+
+
+Young as she was, Frances Madigan had known a great sorrow. She
+remembered (or fancied she did, having heard the circumstance so often
+related) how Francis Madigan had seized and confiscated her cradle as
+soon as her sex had been avowed.
+
+"It's too bad, Madigan!" was the form in which Dr. Murchison had made
+the announcement of her birth.
+
+"It's the last straw--that's what it is," Madigan answered grimly,
+bearing the cradle out to the woodshed. There he chopped it to pieces,
+as though defying a perverse destiny to send him another daughter.
+
+With tears running down her cheeks, Frances had witnessed the pathetic
+sight--or, if she had not, she believed she had; which was quite as
+effective in her narrative of the occurrence.
+
+"And he took my cwadle," Frank was accustomed to relate, with an abused
+sniff to punctuate each phrase, "and he chopped it wif the hatchet all
+in little bits o' pieces."
+
+"How big, Frank?" Sissy liked to ask.
+
+"Teeny-weeny bits--little as that," Frank whined, still in character,
+and showing a small finger-nail. "And--"
+
+"And then what did you do?" prompted Sissy.
+
+Frank stamped her foot. The cynical tone of the question grated upon an
+artistic temperament at the crucial moment when it was composing and
+acting at the same time. "Don't you say it, Sissy Madigan!" she cried
+petulantly. "I can say it myself. And then"--turning to Maude
+Bryne-Stivers, to whom she was telling the touching incident, with a
+resumption of her first manner, and her most heartrending tone--"and
+then I looked first at my cwadle and then at my father, and I cwied--and
+cwied--and cwied--and--"
+
+One is limited at four and is apt to strive for emphasis by the simple
+method of repetition. Frank always "cwied and cwied" till some
+interruption came to the rescue and furnished a climax.
+
+"You dear little lump of sugar!" cried Miss Bryne-Stivers at the proper
+moment, lifting the chubby mourner off her feet and out of her pose at
+the same time.
+
+And Frank, seated on the lady's lap, was content with her effect.
+
+It was a small matter, anyway, with Frank Madigan--the loss of a pose or
+two; she had so many. A parody of parodies was the smallest Madigan, and
+her jokes were the shadows of shades of jokes handed down ready-made to
+her. Yet she was convinced that they were good; otherwise the Madigans
+would not have laughed at them long before she adopted them.
+
+She herself was a victim--as was the gentleman after whom she was
+named--of a surplusage of femininity about the house. All female
+children are mothers before they are girls, the earliest sex-tendency
+having a scientific precedence over others; and the Madigans "played
+with" their smallest sister bodily, as with a doll whose mechanism
+presented more possibilities than that of any mechanical toy they had
+seen--in some other child's possession. Later they were charmed--if but
+for a while--by the field her mentality provided for experimental work.
+There were times when Frances Madigan had a mother for every day in the
+week; there were days when she had no mother at all; and there were
+occasions when she was adopted as a whole, and for a stated time, by
+some Madigan with a theory, which was tried upon her with all the
+remorselessness of a faddist before she was given over as completely to
+its successor.
+
+Thus Sissy had taken possession of her and made of her, in the short
+time her enthusiasm lasted, a visible replica of that which Sissy tried
+to delude herself into thinking was her own character. In those days she
+cut poor Frank's curls off and plastered the child's hair down in a
+strong-minded fashion. She insisted upon her disciple's pronouncing
+clearly and distinctly. She inaugurated a regime of practical common
+sense, small rewards and severe punishments, and taught Frank how to
+count. But not to spell; for Sissy had introduced the fashion among
+Madigans of spelling out the word which was the key-note of a
+sentence--a proceeding that exasperated Frank. "Don't you let her have
+any c-a-n-d-y; Aunt Anne says 't ain't good for her," was a sample of
+the abuses that drove Frank nearly mad with curiosity and indignation.
+
+But finally Sissy joined the Salvation Army with her protegee (religion
+had all the attraction of the impliedly forbidden to the Madigans), and
+was discovered by Francis Madigan one evening on C Street, putting up a
+fluent prayer in a nasal tremolo--an excellent imitation of the
+semi-hysterical falsetto of the bonneted enthusiast who had preceded
+her.
+
+Madigan looked from Sissy--her hypocritical eyes upcast, while her soul
+was ravished by the whispered comment upon her precocity, to which she
+lent an encouraging ear--to Frank, kneeling angelically beside her.
+Something in himself, his enthusiastic, emotional, long-forgotten,
+youthful self, felt the tug of sympathy at the sight, and, after his
+first irritated start, he stood there behind the watching crowd with no
+thought of interference.
+
+"You can thank your stars, you unco guid lassie," he said within
+himself, his sarcastic eyes on Sissy's holy face, "that you've not a
+more religious and more conventional man for a father. 'T is one like
+that would yank you out of your play-acting preaching, or my name's not
+Madigan--ahem!"
+
+He did not know that the exclamation had been uttered aloud. Their
+father was unaware of the habit; but his daughters knew well that
+stentorian clearing of the throat which served for a warning that he was
+about to speak, and also a notification that he had spoken and would
+permit no difference of opinion. In the midst of her religio-dramatic
+ecstasy, Sissy heard that sound behind her, and jumped to her feet as
+though brought painfully back to a sorrowing, sinful world.
+
+"And he tooked her," said Frances later, in relating the affair to an
+eager audience of Madigans, "and he whipped her awful!"
+
+"With his whole hand?" asked Bep, feeling it to be the partizan's duty
+to doubt.
+
+"Uh-huh!" The small fabricator nodded her head in slow and awful
+confirmation.
+
+"That shows, Frank Madigan!" said Bep, scornfully turning her back. "He
+never whips with more than two fingers."
+
+And yet it was the confident belief of the Madigans that if it had been
+anybody but Sissy, that somebody would have been eaten alive!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Split who next adopted the Last Straw. Under her tutelage Frank
+learned to climb her sister's body and stand upright and fearless on her
+shoulders. She was also initiated into the great game of "fats," which
+the Madigans played winter evenings on the crumb-cloth in the
+dining-room; said crumb-cloth being printed in large squares of red and
+white, one of which was chalked off for the ring.
+
+Frank's induction into the game led to a grand battle between Split and
+Sissy, the latter contending that the baby's fingers could not properly
+handle and shoot the marbles. But Sissy ought to have known better than
+to make such a point, as the Madigans had a peculiar way of playing
+fats, for which Frank--being a Madigan--was as fitted by nature as any
+of her seniors.
+
+It consisted, first, in hauling out the big box of marbles, in which the
+booty won by the whole family was kept--the Madigans were gamblers, of
+course, as was everything born on the Comstock. Second, in a desperate
+controversy as to how the marbles were to be divided. Third, in a
+compromise, which necessitated that a complete count be made of every
+marble in the box--and the Madigans' unfeminine skill made this a
+question of handling hundreds of them, of suspiciously watching one
+another, of losing and of finding; and it all took time. Fourth, a
+decision as to handicaps. Fifth, a heated discussion of the relative
+values of puries, pottries, agates, crystals, and 'dobies. Sixth, a
+fiery attack from Sissy on Split's lucky taw. Seventh, the falling
+asleep of Frank squarely over the ring. And eighth, the sending of the
+whole tribe to bed by Aunt Annethe entire evening having been taken up
+with arranging an order of business, and not a stroke of business
+accomplished.
+
+But the Split sphere of influence over the disputed territory of Frances
+was considerably circumscribed by the affair of the stagecoach. It
+stood--a dusty, lumbering vehicle that made daily trips down from the
+mountain to the small towns in the canon--upon a raised platform in
+front of Baldy Bob's. Baldy Bob, who departed with it the first thing in
+the morning and returned late in the afternoon, hauled it each day up on
+to the platform, intending to get out the hose and wash it off--after
+dinner when he came back from downtown. But he never came back till time
+to hitch up and start down the canon again. So the old coach was left
+high and dry, while the sun went down behind Mount Davidson and the
+brightest stars in all the world shone out from a black-blue firmament
+unmarred by the smallest haze.
+
+Till Split discovered it.
+
+To Split, who had never traveled by any means other than her own lithe
+limbs and Jack Cody's sled, the coach's big, low, dusty body, its heavy
+high wheels, its dusky interior smelling of heated leather and
+twig-scented, summer-sunned country dust, were romance incarnate. It
+meant voyaging to her, this coach: strange sights, queer peoples, the
+sea that she had never seen, the rippling of rivers she had never heard,
+the smell of pasture-land, of pine forests, of lake-dipped willows, of
+flowers--valleys full of flowers, like those that bloomed in Mrs.
+Pemberton's garden, but unlike those enchanted blossoms in not being
+irrevocably attached to the bush on which they grew, and unguarded by
+any Mrs. Ramrod, whose most gracious act was to hold up a rose on its
+stalk between forefinger and thumb and permit a flower-hungry girl to
+bend down and sniff it. On the same principle, Mrs. Ramrod _showed_ her
+preserves, but she never bestowed a rose "for keeps," nor did it ever
+seem to occur to her that one might want a taste of that which made her
+glass jars so temptingly beautiful.
+
+Split "took a dare" the first time she mounted Baldy Bob's coach. She
+climbed up to the driver's high seat in front with as much hidden
+trepidation but as unhesitatingly as she would have plunged down a
+shaft, to show Sissy, who was a coward, how brave her sister was.
+
+But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's
+coach Split was seized with _Wanderlust_. She sat erect and still up
+there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted
+from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes
+of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and
+flying past, on great rolling fields of grain--perhaps a smooth, light,
+continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers
+seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box.
+
+Yet with the advent of Frances into this strange game of rapt silences
+there came a change. Frank's imagination did not tempt her abroad
+strange countries for to see; she merely wanted to ride down and off the
+platform.
+
+"Make it go, Split," she begged, with a trust in her big sister's
+capacity that Split would have perished rather than admit to be
+unfounded.
+
+"Will you hold on tight?" she asked Frances.
+
+The child nodded, grasping the dashboard firmly. With the ease of long
+practice, Split got to the big wheel and leaped to the ground. She had
+noticed the big stone which Baldy Bob had slipped in front of the hind
+wheel, and she fancied it was part of the reason why the stagecoach
+could not be moved.
+
+She was mistaken: it was the whole reason. And when Split had pushed and
+tugged and kicked with all her strength, laying herself flat at last and
+bracing her toes against the other wheel to get a leverage, her first
+feeling when she saw the coach move above her head was of delight at the
+unexpected. Her second was of unmixed terror; for, gaining an impetus
+from its descent on the inclined plane that led from the platform, the
+coach rattled briskly down Sutton Avenue, headed for the canon, with
+Frank clutching the dashboard and laughing aloud in glee.
+
+Split Madigan had always fancied she could run. She never knew how
+impotent human fleetness is till she saw that lumbering coach go
+plunging swiftly and more swiftly away from her, across B Street, and
+tearing down the next hill with a speed that made her puny efforts
+laughable.
+
+Baldy Bob, emerging from the saloon on the corner with that feverishly
+distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner
+downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing
+so long promised. If it had been morning, he would have been properly
+afraid of getting in the way of the monster let loose. But in the
+evening Bob was accustomed to the occurrence of peculiar things. So he
+ran--at that time of day he could run better than walk--out to the
+middle of the street, threw up his arms, and called hoarsely upon the
+mad thing to stop.
+
+It did--for a moment, when it came in contact with his body; but it was
+long enough for its course to be deflected from the steep hill below and
+turned northward down the comparatively level cross street.
+
+When Bob picked himself up and followed, he found a thin, white-faced,
+red-haired girl running swiftly beside him. Later he accompanied her and
+the plucky little Frank (still smiling and chuckling over her fine ride)
+up the hill to the home of Mr. Francis Madigan, where he demanded
+damages--both personal and mechanical.
+
+"And fa-ther tooked her in his own room," Frank said with shuddering
+unction, as she told the tale, "and she's in there yet!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was Fom who awakened a sense of the beautiful in Frank. She and Bep
+were continually playing London Bridge, in the course of which it became
+necessary to demand:
+
+"Which would you rather have (that means, like best): a diamond horse
+covered with stars, or a golden cradle with red silk pillows?"
+
+Sentiment and the sad experience of her babyhood always prompted Frank
+to choose the cradle, of course. After which, her preference promptly
+became of no importance whatever; the whole beautiful business was put
+aside, and she was bidden to get behind Fom. She discovered later that
+whether she preferred diamonds and stars to gold and red silk, it was
+all the same: she invariably had to get behind one twin or the other,
+clasp her tightly about the waist, and pull--and pull--till the whole
+universe gave way and she plumped down on the ground with a big twin
+falling on top of her.
+
+But there was another phase of the beautiful which was far more
+satisfactory to Frank, while it lasted. Fom discovered it one day when
+Split took Dora away from her, just because the brunette twin preferred
+her lunch to the burned potatoes Split had baked in the back yard when
+they were playing emigrants. It was then, in the depths of her grief,
+that the inspiration came to her.
+
+"Shall Fom make you look awful pretty, Frank?" she asked, in the form
+which children suppose wheedles babies most successfully.
+
+Frank didn't know; she was suspicious of the hollowness of the
+beautiful and the inutility of choosing. Besides, she was making dolls'
+biscuit just then from a piece of dough Wong had given her, cutting out
+each individual bun with Aunt Anne's thimble.
+
+But Florence coaxed and threatened and bribed, and when Francis Madigan
+got home that night to dinner, he found his big porch covered with
+children gathered from blocks around. Each held in his or her hand one
+pin or more--the price of admission to the show. (Fom was a most thrifty
+and businesslike Madigan.) And the show, which he as well as they saw in
+the interval between the opening of his front door and its swift
+closing, was Frances's plump, naked body draped in a sheet, posing, with
+uplifted arms and an uncertain, apprehensive smile, on a tottering
+draped pedestal, which fell with a crash when Fom, who was crouched
+behind steadying it, beheld her father's face.
+
+"And he tooked her," with bated breath Frank repeated the monotonous
+refrain of her saga, "and he made her thwow evewy--pin--she'd made--out
+the fwont window!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As a Madigan, Frances should have been above fear. She was--except of
+the tank in the back room up-stairs. Its gurglings and chucklings were
+more than mortal four-years-old could bear at night in the dark,
+particularly after Bep had taught her to be superstitious.
+
+Bep's nature was spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in
+every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of
+remedies, and was ready to try a new one--on somebody else--whenever the
+occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march
+around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and
+of speechless anger at the Madigans who followed mimicking her, Bep
+decided that she would try the latest cure she had heard of. So she
+wandered down to the gas-works one day, Frank's hand in hers, to give
+her patient the benefit of breathing the heavily charged atmosphere down
+there.
+
+"How-do, Mrs. Grayson?" she greeted the gas-man's wife amiably, as she
+opened the kitchen door.
+
+Mrs. Grayson, her babies leaving her side to cluster interestedly around
+Frank, replied that she and the children were well; that the epidemic of
+whooping-cough had not reached them because they lived so far out of
+town.
+
+"Yes," assented Bep, politely; "and then, the smell of gas is so good
+for whooping-cough. That keeps 'em well. And that's why I brought Frank
+down here."
+
+Mrs. Grayson's excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she
+said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells kept off
+whooping-cough."
+
+"No, neither did I, though p'r'aps it does. But it cures--I know that."
+
+"You don't mean to say--" Mrs. Grayson flew like a terrified hen for her
+chicks, lifting two by an arm each clear from the ground and hustling
+the third into the kitchen before her.
+
+"Yep, she's got it," said Bep, proudly. And Frank, feeling called upon
+to be interesting, burst into a convulsive corroboration of the glad
+tidings.
+
+"You nasty little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson, as she shut the door in
+Bep's face.
+
+"What's 'minx'?" Frank asked her sister, as they toiled up toward town
+again.
+
+"Oh, it's a wild animal," answered Bep, readily; "but she don't know how
+to say it. She's going to have bad luck, though; anybody can tell that
+by the way she walked under that ladder. I shouldn't be a bit surprised
+if every last one of her children gets the whooping-cough!"
+
+And Frank felt sorry for the Graysons. For she was sure that Bep knew
+whereof she spoke. She knew the laws of the superstitious country in
+which she dwelt, did Bep: a country where if you sing before you eat,
+you're bound to cry before you sleep; where, if you put your
+corset-waist on wrong side out, and are hardy enough to change it, you
+deserve what you're likely to get; where no sane girl will tempt
+Providence by walking on a crack; where, if you lose something, you have
+only to spit in the palm of your hand,--if you're dowered in the matter
+of saliva,--strike the tiny pool sharply, and say:
+
+    "Spit, spit, spider!
+    If you show me where my pencil is
+    I'll give you a keg of cider!"
+
+Then note the direction which the escaping particles of saliva take, and
+there you are! or, rather, there it is--the lost article.
+
+Or there it ought to be, unless you have been guilty of some inexcusable
+act, such as omitting to wish at the very instant a star is falling, or
+the first time you taste each new fruit in season, or if you have
+forgotten to say:
+
+    "Star light, star bright,
+    First star I've seen to-night,
+    I wish I may, I wish I might
+    Have the wish I wish to-night!"
+
+It was Bep who taught Frank to count white horses; to pick up a pin when
+its head was turned toward her, to let it lie when it pointed the other
+way; to bite the tea-grounds left in a cup, and declare gravely, if
+soft, that a female visitor might be expected, and, if hard, a male;
+never to cut friendship by giving or accepting a knife, a pin--indeed,
+anything sharp; and never, by any chance, to tempt the devil of bad luck
+by going out of a house by a different door than that by which she had
+entered.
+
+The versatile Frank was most teachable. When Bep was "collecting bows,"
+Frances would obligingly bow and bob for her minutes at a time, like a
+Chinese mandarin, or like some small priestess observing a solemn rite.
+What the Bad Luck was, the terrible alternative of all these
+precautions, poor Frank could form no idea. But she had come to
+associate it with the babbling tank, which seemed at night, when all was
+still, to be gurgling, "Bad Luck--Bad Luck!" threateningly at her.
+
+Then she would go over her conduct during the day, carefully
+scrutinizing her every action that might have given this chuckling Bad
+Luck a hold over her.
+
+Not a crack had been stepped on that she could remember; not a pin
+picked up that should have been let lie; not--
+
+The scream that burst from Frances one Sunday night during this
+self-catechism brought Madigan and all the family to her bedside.
+
+"What is it--what is it, child?" demanded her father.
+
+And Frank repeated like a Maeterlinck or a bobolink, holding up a
+shaking small hand whose nails Aunt Anne had trimmed that very morning:
+
+    "Monday for health,
+    Tuesday for wealth,
+    Wednesday the best day of all.
+    Thursday for cwosses,
+    Fwiday for losses--
+    Saturday no day at all.
+    And better the child had never been bawn
+    That pared its nails on a Sunday mawn!"
+
+"And fa-ther tooked Bep," remarked Frank the next day, the light of
+desire fulfilled in her eye, "and he said 'You ox!' and smacked her wif
+two fingers!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Madigan, who was a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency
+confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female
+Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in
+turn--only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to an expressing
+age.
+
+It occurred to her once to satisfy her maternal cravings--so perversely
+left ungratified amid much material that lacked mothering--with an
+imported angel-child. She chose Bombey Forrest's three-year-old brother
+for the purpose; a small manikin manufactured according to recipe by his
+mother, whom he had been taught to call "Dear-rust" in imitation of his
+pernicious progenitor; whose curls were as long, whose trousers were as
+short, whose collars were as big, whose sashes were as flaunting as
+feminine folly could make them.
+
+The Madigans hailed his advent with delight the night he was loaned to
+their aunt, in their mistaken glee fancying his visit was to themselves.
+Miss Madigan soon undeceived them. At table he sat next to that devoted
+lady, who heaped the choicest bits upon his plate of a menu which had
+been ordered solely with regard to infantile tastes. Afterward this
+maiden lady (whose genius for mothering cruel fate had condemned to
+waste its sweetness upon half a dozen mere Madigans) built card houses
+for her borrowed baby, read him the nursery rhymes that Sissy used to
+tell to Frances, confiscated Fom's Dora for his pleasure, and Split's
+book of interiors made of illustrated advertisements of furniture, which
+she had cut out and arranged tastefully upon a tissue-paper background.
+She dangled her old-fashioned enameled watch before his jaded eyes, and
+even permitted him to hold Dusie, the canary, who pecked furiously at
+the presuming hand that detained her.
+
+At this the borrowed baby set up a howl of alarm, whereupon he was given
+Sissy's jackstones--not altogether to that young lady's sorrow, for at
+that moment Split was collecting a cruel pinch or bestowing a stinging
+slap for every point in the game she had just won.
+
+To the bathing of the child Miss Madigan gave her personal attention,
+while Kate waited for the tub, into which it was her nightly task to
+coax Frances. Then, when her charge was ready for bed, the devoted aunt
+of other children sat rocking the borrowed baby softly till he fell
+asleep. The whole household hushed that night when Baby Fauntleroy
+Forrest's eyelids fell. An indignant lot of young Madigans were hustled
+off to bed that his slumbers might not be disturbed; and yet the moment
+Miss Madigan laid him, with infinite care and a sentimental smile, in
+her own bed, his eyes flew open, like the disordered orbs of a wax doll
+that has forgotten it was made to open its eyes when in a vertical
+position and keep them shut when placed horizontally. He saw a strange
+face bending over him, and he howled with terror.
+
+Miss Madigan tried to comfort him, babbling fondest baby-talk in vain.
+
+"I yant to go home!" wailed Aunt Anne's Fauntleroy.
+
+Why, no; he didn't want to go home, the lady to whom he had been loaned
+assured him. Mama was asleep and daddy was asleep and Bombey was asleep
+and the pussy was--
+
+"I yant to go home!" bellowed the borrowed baby.
+
+But how could he go home? the lady, a bit impatiently, demanded. Wasn't
+he all undressed? Did he want to go through the streets all
+undressed--fie, fie, for shame!
+
+"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy Forrest.
+
+"Sissy--Irene--some one come here and amuse this child!" called Aunt
+Anne, at her wits' end. Fauntleroy was black in the face from holding
+his breath, and his borrower was nervously exhausted by the tension of a
+day spent in attendance upon the lovely child.
+
+A troop of nightgowned Madigans came joyously in. For the edification of
+Fauntleroy, sitting up wide-eyed now in Aunt Anne's big bed, the tears
+still on his cheeks, the Madigans made monkeys of themselves till he
+dropped off asleep at last, when they were dismissed by a frazzled
+maiden lady, who was left looking at the small thing lying in her bed as
+at some strange animal whose waking she dreaded.
+
+In the middle of the night and again toward morning the Madigans heard
+Fauntleroy's frightened scream, and chuckled like the depraved young
+things they were. But when Francis Madigan got up and, candle in hand,
+his queer nightcap tumbling over his left eye, and his gaunt shadow
+covering the wall and wavering over the ceiling, came to demand of Miss
+Madigan what in thousand devils was the matter, the borrowed baby was
+thrown into convulsions; while Don, the big Newfoundland, awakened by
+the din, burst into hoarse barks that the mountains echoed and reechoed.
+After this it seemed best to Aunt Anne to sit up in bed for the rest of
+the night, making shadow-pictures on the wall for Fauntleroy.
+
+Miss Madigan's high color had faded the next morning. Accustomed to
+unbroken sleep, she had not rested half an hour the whole night. It
+seemed that Fauntleroy Forrest was in the habit of lying across his bed
+instead of along it, and he had so terrorized the poor lady that she had
+not dared to move him, when he did fall asleep toward morning and she
+felt his toes digging into her ribs, lest he wake.
+
+"Hurry with your breakfast, Sissy," she said faintly, sipping her tea,
+"so that you can take him home before school."
+
+"Don't yant to go home!" whimpered the baby, whom the morning light and
+the presence of many small Madigans had reassured.
+
+"He could stay and play with Frank, couldn't he, Aunt Anne?" suggested
+Sissy, sweetly.
+
+Miss Madigan's look spoke volumes.
+
+"Yes, yes," cried Fauntleroy. "Don't yant to go home!"
+
+His papa would be lonesome, Miss Madigan told him, archly; and his mama
+would be lonesome, and Bombey--
+
+"Don't yant to go home!" wept the baby.
+
+"There! There!... Take him, Frank, into my room and amuse him--anything,
+only don't let him cry!" exclaimed Miss Madigan. "I'm going into Kate's
+room to lie down. I'm exhausted and--"
+
+"Did Fauntleroy disturb you, Aunt Anne?" asked Kate, sympathetically.
+
+But Miss Madigan hurried away. She was so unnerved she feared that she
+might weep. But, after nearly half an hour's trying, she found she was
+too tired to sleep, after all, and rising wearily, she went back to her
+room for the book she had been reading.
+
+The sight that met her eyes, as she opened the door, completed her
+undoing. There was Fauntleroy, with an uncomprehending grin on his
+cherubic face, pinching each separate leaf of her cherished
+sensitive-plant. Evidently the borrowed baby did not exactly understand
+the desperately funny quality of the act, but he knew it must be the
+funniest thing in the world, for the Madigans were writhing grotesquely
+in the unbounded merriment it caused.
+
+With a cry, Miss Madigan flew forward and sharply slapped the
+destructive baby hands.
+
+"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy.
+
+"Yes; and I want you to go, too," Miss Madigan declared, incensed. "Get
+his things, Sissy, this minute."
+
+"But I want him to play wif," whimpered Frank. She was not so slow but
+that she could learn the lesson Fauntleroy's success taught.
+
+Miss Madigan looked at her a moment. "Oh, you do!" she ejaculated
+sarcastically. "You haven't sisters enough--you want more noise and
+confusion in this house!"
+
+The wise Madigans looked from her to one another and merely thought
+things. There was sadly little of the "angel child" about them. Their
+intuition was keen enough to penetrate their aunt's secret wishes and
+tastes, and they were occasionally tempted, for the spoils to be gotten
+out of it, to play up to that lady's ideals. But Aunt Anne was
+considered almost too easy by the Madigans, whom honor restricted to
+those foemen worthy of their steel. Frances was the only one who could,
+without losing caste, cater to her aunt's well-known and deeply detested
+sentimentality.
+
+She did for a time, and it was from Miss Madigan that she learned her
+famous accomplishment. It was sung, or rather droned, and it went like
+this:
+
+    "B--A--Ba,
+    B--E--Be,
+    B--I--Bi--
+    Ba--Be--Bi;
+    B--O--Bo,
+    Ba--Be--Bi--Bo,
+    B--U--Bu,
+    Ba--Be--Bi--Bo--Bu!"
+
+Intoxicated by success, Frank sang this subtle ditty one day for Francis
+Madigan. He listened to it with that puzzled expression which his
+children's vagaries brought to his lined, stern face.
+
+"Who taught you that nonsense, Frances?" he demanded sternly when she
+had finished.
+
+Frank began to whimper. This was not the effect she had intended to
+produce.
+
+"Who told you to say that gibberish?" her father repeated angrily.
+
+Frank stammered the answer.
+
+"And he tooked her--" she began her account of the incident afterward.
+
+"Oh, you awful little liar!" interrupted a chorus of Madigans.
+
+And Frank laughed with them. How she would have completed the sentence,
+if she had been permitted, she herself did not know.
+
+
+
+
+A READY LETTER-WRITER
+
+
+Split threw herself with a bump against Miss Madigan's door. It remained
+unansweringly closed.
+
+"Where's Aunt Anne?" she asked Sissy, whom she had nearly walked over as
+she sat playing jackstones in the hall.
+
+Sissy looked up. Assuming a rigidly erect position and scholastically
+correct finger-movement, she mimicked her aunt at her desk so faithfully
+that Split could almost see the close-lined pages of Miss Madigan's
+ornate handwriting on the carpet where her disrespectful niece pretended
+to trace it.
+
+"Scribbling, huh?" Split asked.
+
+Sissy nodded.
+
+Split shrugged her shoulders impatiently. She had intended to ask a
+favor of Aunt Anne, but she knew how useless it would be now. So she
+pushed past Sissy, entered the room softly, and returned with a
+long-trained grenadine skirt.
+
+Sissy's round eyes opened enviously. "Did she say you could have it?"
+she asked.
+
+A muffled sound which could be variously interpreted came from Split,
+who was throwing the skirt over her head.
+
+"Did she?" persisted Sissy, putting her jackstones in her pocket and
+rising emulatively.
+
+But Irene was doubling fold after fold of the skirt in front to shorten
+it; behind her the train billowed with an elegance that sent ecstatic
+thrills through her and a passion of envy through her sister.
+
+"Is she writing yet?" Sissy asked at length.
+
+Irene nodded. She was cinching her sash tight about the waist, so that
+her trained skirt might not come off in the ardor of "playing lady."
+When Sissy disappeared, and reappeared with her aunt's claret-colored
+poplin, Split was catching up her train with a grace that was simply
+ravishing as she rustled away.
+
+"What'll you say to her--afterward?" called Sissy after her, prudently
+facing the future, even in the height of delight induced by feeling
+ruffles about her feet.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In
+      Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry"]
+
+"Pouf!" A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred
+and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herself to be very
+French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her.
+She never knows what she says when she's writing."
+
+Sissy nodded understandingly, and rustled in a most ladylike manner
+after her senior. The twins saw the two beautiful creatures swishing
+down the front steps, bound for the street to show their glory and feel
+the peacock's delight in dragging his tail in the dust.
+
+"Did she say you could have 'em?" they shrieked.
+
+And Sissy responded with that quick imitative gesture that signified
+scribbling.
+
+With a light on their faces such as the Goths might have worn when
+pillaging Rome, the twins made for the treasure-house. A few moments
+later they rustled gorgeously down the steps, followed by Frances,
+wearing her aunt's embroidered red flannel petticoat. Unfortunately,
+Frank's heels caught in this, as she too strutted worldward, and down
+she fell, bumping from step to step, gaining momentum as she bumped, and
+threatening to roll clear down to Taylor Street, and so on down, down
+into the canon, if she had not bumped safely at last into the twins.
+They, hearing her coming, had turned their backs and joined hands, and
+catching hold of the shaky banister on each side, presented a natural
+bulwark beyond which Frances and her bumps and shrieks might not pass.
+
+And through it all Miss Madigan wrote.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Madigan was writing letters. Indeed, Miss Madigan was always
+writing letters. In any emergency she might be trusted to concoct a long
+and literary epistle, which she rephrased, edited, and copied till she
+felt all an author's satisfaction.
+
+For the Madigans' Aunt Anne was afflicted with _cacoethes scribendi_,
+and was never so happy as when there was a letter to be written--except
+when she was actually writing it. But the heartlessness of the merely
+literary was very far indeed from Miss Madigan's ideal. She had the
+happiness to believe that, besides being very beautiful, her letters
+were most useful--in fact, indispensable. When everything else failed
+she wrote a letter. When that failed she wrote another.
+
+A Malthusian consequence of her epistolary fertility, it might be
+feared, would be the necessary exhaustion of correspondents. But Miss
+Madigan's was a soul above the inevitable, as well as a pen divorced
+from the practical. On those occasions when the future of her nieces
+pressed itself questioningly upon that lady's mind she met the threat by
+declaring firmly to herself that she would "do her duty to those
+motherless children." It happened that her duty was her pleasure. It was
+her dissipation to suffer--on paper. In letters she enjoyed being
+miserable. No relative, therefore, however distant, no acquaintance,
+however slight, was exempt from this epistolary plague. To take the
+darkest view, most genteelly expressed; to make the most forthright and
+pitiful appeal in a ladylike and polished phrase; to picture the
+inevitable and speedy alternative if her plea were disregarded; and then
+to sign herself, "With a thousand apologies, and the assurance that only
+the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's
+children would bring me to trouble you again,"--this was Miss Madigan's
+vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously
+good can be.
+
+A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened,
+produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of
+her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her
+own summing up of the situation that she felt there could not be the
+smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be
+convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do--write to
+him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific
+family, its members widely scattered and differentiated--an ideal
+clientele for a ready letter-writer.
+
+So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated,
+yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of
+gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.
+
+But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.
+
+"Anne, I say!"
+
+Miss Madigan's busy pen paused. It seemed to her that there was unusual
+irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had
+knocked before, or was there--
+
+The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight
+of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was
+writing.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "Stamping ... in a frenzy"]
+
+"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it
+may be a change for you to _read_ letters. Read that!" He threw the page
+on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of
+fury.
+
+She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was
+one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a
+babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:
+
+    Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The
+    habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more
+    resist it than Miles could the bottle.
+
+"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.
+
+"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."
+
+He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had
+cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based
+unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of which, to do the
+poor lady justice, was intended directly for her own habitation.
+
+She took the letter and spread it out carefully before her; these
+epistolary children of hers were tenderly dear to Miss Madigan. Her eye
+caught a phrase here and there that appeared to be singularly
+felicitous. This one, for instance:
+
+    Poor Francis, of course, knows nothing about this
+    letter. I am writing to you, my dear cousin, relying as
+    much upon your discretion as upon your generosity.
+
+Or this one:
+
+    And Cecilia--she is really talented, though a commonplace
+    creature like myself can hardly give you an idea in just
+    what direction.
+
+Or this one:
+
+    As to Irene, apart from her voice, which is really
+    exceptional, she is Francis over again--Francis as he
+    was, a high-spirited, reckless, devil-may-care fellow,
+    winning and tyrannical, as we all remember him in the
+    old days when the world was young.
+
+Or even this:
+
+    I am afraid Kate will have to teach school, young as
+    she is. I can't tell you how I dread the long years of
+    drudgery I see before this slender, spirited child--she
+    is little more than that. Think, Miles, of these
+    motherless children growing up in this wretched hole
+    without the smallest advantage, and, if you can, help
+    them; or get some one else to. Couldn't you take Kate
+    into your own family? I'm sure she'd marry well, and
+    Nora wouldn't be troubled with her long. She's really
+    very pretty. Or couldn't you send me a little something
+    to spend on clothes for her? Or couldn't Nora be
+    persuaded to send her--
+
+"Well," thundered Madigan, standing over her, "it must be pretty
+familiar to you. Suppose you read what Nora says."
+
+Miss Madigan put her own letter away with a sigh. It was really
+unaccountable that Miles could have resisted it.
+
+     "Miles passed away six weeks ago,"
+
+she read aloud in an awed voice.
+
+    "He had been ailing all spring. This letter, which came
+    a fortnight since, I opened, of course, and return it
+    to you that you may be made aware (if you are not
+    already) of the demands Anne makes upon comparative
+    strangers.
+
+    "For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in
+    such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your
+    children, all girls; but that can't be true--she always
+    loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her
+    writing is so illegible that--"
+
+Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions
+upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her
+penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.
+
+"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.
+
+"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said?
+Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because
+I don't dare to beg in my own name."
+
+"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked.
+"Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.
+
+"'Where'! Thousand devils--'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw
+it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.
+
+Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to
+find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into
+such a rage.
+
+A silence followed.
+
+"Look here, Anne,"--Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be
+calm,--"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write
+to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share
+of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt
+my--"
+
+"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should
+not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces'
+sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities
+have--"
+
+"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"
+
+"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see,
+my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old
+duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the
+girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning--"
+
+With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its
+stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.
+
+Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the
+scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's
+letter:
+
+    As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the
+    estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan.
+    Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little
+    matter of her never having seen him would not, of
+    course, stand in her way.
+
+"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.
+
+She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from
+her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the
+slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not--
+
+Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied
+pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the
+sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them.
+In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down
+like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and
+imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.
+
+They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the
+attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things
+farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a
+boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In
+their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right
+sex, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk
+unrecognized in the rear.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled"]
+
+In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cut her adorer dead, dead, dead,
+and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the
+feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and
+tyrannical) over the other sex.
+
+"Let's try to see the walking-match," she suggested to Split.
+
+"How can we, with all that tagging after us?"
+
+With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins
+and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but
+beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had
+never before been out on a raid.
+
+"Let 'em tag," cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no
+obstacles.
+
+Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the
+Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed
+could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing.
+Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling,
+dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady
+it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female
+projectile.
+
+Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way of flourish to mark the conclusion
+of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught
+her, with a whoop of satisfaction.
+
+His whoop was cut short abruptly, and he set her down, his ears
+tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the
+offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as
+anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the
+short time given to her.
+
+Cody looked at her. It was really the first time he had regarded her as
+an unrelated individual. "Ye know what a boy does when a girl strikes
+him," he threatened, a laughing glitter in his bold black eye that made
+Sissy's heart jump.
+
+But she held herself very primly, and the masking puritan in her voice
+quelled him. "If he's a coward--yes," she responded haughtily, hurrying
+on.
+
+The boy looked after her as he joined Split. "She's funny--your sister,"
+he said lamely.
+
+"Who--Sissy? Oh, she's always cranky," said Irene, with Madigan candor
+when a relative was criticized.
+
+They hurried on. The barn-like opera-house is built uphill, like all
+buildings on Virginia City's cross-streets, and it seems to burrow into
+as well as climb the hill. In the rear, on the side where its boards
+were unpainted and unplaned, certain knots had been converted into
+knot-holes by the initiated.
+
+Sissy was already on her knees, her eye glued to one of these apertures.
+All she could see was a short curve of empty seats, a man's shoulder and
+another's hat, a long space, and then the passing of a neat, long pair
+of women's gaiters unhidden by skirts, and soon after the nervous
+following of a smaller pair of women's ties.
+
+"Why," she said, with a deep blush, fixing one eye upon the company,
+while the other blinked from the strain put upon it, "they're women!
+It's a women's walking-match."
+
+"Sure," said Cody, without withdrawing his attention for a moment from
+the view inside. "The big, long feet belong to the one they call La
+Tourtillotte. She's French. The German one's Von Hagen."
+
+"I think it's a shame," gasped Sissy. "Let's go home, Split."
+
+Split, at her own particular knot-hole, affected not to hear. But Crosby
+Pemberton, perched in the elbow of some long scantlings bracing the
+building, took heart at Sissy's words.
+
+"It isn't respectable, Sissy," he called to her. "No ladies go. Your
+aunt wouldn't like it."
+
+This was fatal. At his voice Sissy hardened, and with a gulp of disgust
+she resolutely turned her attention to her knot-hole. In fact, as Crosby
+reiterated his advice, she felt called upon more spectacularly to ignore
+it, and seeing a more commanding and spacious knot-hole farther up, she
+mounted upon a big dry-goods box, and from there seated herself in a
+lone poplar, the apple of the proprietor's eye.
+
+This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could
+plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short
+rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like
+pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to
+flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more
+slowly around the circular track.
+
+Despite her shocked sense of propriety,--and the lawless young Madigans
+had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,--the ardor of
+the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. She heard
+a swift call from Irene, some distance below, and was vaguely aware that
+the company, skirted and otherwise, was beating a retreat. But the
+smaller of the two contestants, on the other side of the knot-hole, had
+just come within the field of Sissy's rude lens. It was pitiable to see
+the haggard look on the German woman's plump face, the childish
+breakdown imminent behind the woman's staring eyes that met the bored
+glance of the male spectators doggedly, though her stout little body was
+still being carried resolutely, sluggishly, painfully along.
+
+Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to
+her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with
+sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent
+whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her
+that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a
+representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake
+to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on
+the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for
+his own sins and every other man's.
+
+"Quick--quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt.
+
+"Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a
+limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and
+their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet.
+
+"Jan Lally--oh, hurry!"
+
+Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little
+German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his
+jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of
+skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to
+catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying.
+
+Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the course of their maraudings,
+the Madigans were not unaccustomed to a stern-chase and a lively one,
+yet now it seemed to her that strategy was the watchword. Perched high
+up in the tree, hidden by its foliage, who would notice her--if only
+Crosby would go away!
+
+But Crosby would not budge. He begged, he implored, he became confused
+in trying to explain to her her danger, and at last burst into bitter
+tears as he felt Lally's fat, moist hand upon his collar, and saw a
+hereafter peopled with wrathful motherly faces in various stages of
+disgust and despair.
+
+"You come vid me. I gif you to Riddle. He lock you oop, you bat boy!"
+
+A suppressed giggle of pleasure, at the thought of neat little Crosby
+in the hands of the constable, shook Sissy, perched snugly like a
+malicious little bird in the tree. It served him right, she said to
+herself gleefully, ascribing the basest motives to Crosby, as one loves
+to do when one's friends are not in good standing with one's self. He
+had had no business to hang around and point the way to her
+hiding-place!
+
+"Oh, I say, Jan, let me off!" begged Crosby, white with terror of the
+jail--and his lady mother. "I'll never peek again, sure I won't!"
+
+"Nu! You come vid me. And _you_, too!"
+
+Sissy looked down. Was it possible there was another laggard whom she
+had not seen?
+
+"I say--you, too!" bellowed Lally. "Vill you come now?"
+
+In the very certainty of security a sudden panic fell upon Sissy. If she
+only dared to move, to reassure herself! Of course it couldn't mean
+herself--oh!
+
+She felt a sudden tug that almost dislodged her. "You t'ink I don't
+see--huh?" shouted the perspiring Teuton below. "What for you leave dis
+trail hang down den--hey?" And he tugged again.
+
+With a sickly remnant of dignity Sissy stepped down and out. She had
+forgotten her train--the train that had been at once her pride and her
+undoing.
+
+"We--I was playing lady," she explained, trembling.
+
+"Oop a tree--huh? Peeking t'rough knot-holes--yes? A fine lady! I fix
+you."
+
+A glow of defiance came to Sissy's cheeks. "I don't care," she cried,
+stamping her foot as she stood enthroned on the dry-goods box, her train
+about her. "It's a nasty, cruel show, anyway, and you couldn't hire me
+to come and see it. You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lally! How'd you like
+it if your wife was staggering along in there without sleeping or eating
+for six days?"
+
+Mr. Jan Lally's purple face looked as though it had been slapped. What
+had Mrs. Lally, with all her babies and busy housekeeping, to do with
+business? He was so astonished and perplexed by the sudden onslaught
+that the wriggling Crosby managed to slip out of his grasp, and got to a
+safe distance before Lally realized it.
+
+"Nu!" he grunted. "I cou'n't hire you--no? Vell, you come mitout hire. I
+show _you_."
+
+Sissy felt herself lifted down without ceremony and dragged off. Her
+round face was white, her heart was beating like the stamps at the
+Chollar pan-mill. Yet her train trailed after her still in mock dignity.
+So did Crosby, at a respectful distance, fearing to follow, yet, though
+helpless, incapable of desertion. But at the entrance to the opera-house
+the door was shut in his face.
+
+Sissy and her captor entered. The stage had been built out over the pit,
+and in the very first row of the dress-circle, the rim of which was the
+boundary of the contestants' suffering feet, Jan Lally sat down, with
+Sissy at his side.
+
+Ah, to sit in the front row of the dress-circle! To feel the opulence of
+one's enviable position, as well as the artistic delight of being
+properly placed where one could miss nothing, while the brass band
+outside the opera-house played its third and last quick, jubilant
+invitation to pleasure--so tantalizing to the outsider, so gratifying to
+the fortunate one within!
+
+Many and many a time had Sissy Madigan waited, during first and second
+bands, for some miracle to set her where she now sat! Many a time had
+the third selection been played, the players with their instruments
+filed into Paradise, and the poor Madigan peri remained shut outside.
+
+But now Cecilia hung her head, shamed by being caught; shamed by
+punishment; shamed trebly by the fact that, apart from those poor
+sexless, half-maddened machines tottering feverishly around and forever
+around, she, Sissy Madigan, the proud, the pure, the proper, was the one
+thing womanly in the house!
+
+It was not a full house by any means, and only the men immediately next
+to her seemed aware of her presence. Yet, with a consciousness that
+seared her soul and humbled the pride of the childish prude as with a
+stain upon her purity, Sissy felt the compounded, composite gaze of man
+upon woman out of place. It withered, it scorched, it stung her.
+
+But finally Von Hagen, the little German woman, going the round of her
+maddening treadmill, reached the spot where Sissy sat. The sight of a
+child there, of a bare, bowed, neat little head in the midst of that
+inclosure of men's cold eyes, seemed to be the last touch needed to
+overthrow her tottering reason. She stopped, swaying from the
+unaccustomed cessation of motion, and held out her arms, smiling
+vacantly and babbling baby-talk in German as though to a dearly loved
+little _Maedchen_ of her own.
+
+Swift horror piled on Sissy. She had never looked into eyes from which
+sense had fled, and the sight stamped itself upon her brain with
+terrible vividness as food for future nightmares. So frightened was she
+that she was not aware of Jan Lally's relaxed hold upon her arm, which
+ached from the tight grip he had had upon it. But when the overtaxed
+body of the German woman fell in a heap almost at her feet, fright
+became action in Sissy. She flew past old Jan (his one concern now being
+for his walking-match), past the knees of the staring men, up the
+interminable center aisle, her poor train switching behind her as she
+stumbled, yet ran on, so absorbed by her suffering that she was unaware
+of the attention her queer little figure attracted, till she was out at
+last in the free air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well, punish me!" she said, when she found Aunt Anne waiting for her at
+the head of the long steps fifteen minutes later.
+
+It was a good deal for a Madigan--the nearest they ever got to _mea
+culpa_: they were not Christians.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sissy's arrival was hailed by a populous nightgowned world, sent, like
+herself, supperless for its sins to the purgatory of early bedtime.
+Split came stealing in from the other room, bringing Frank along that
+she might not cry and betray her elder sister's movements--a successful
+sort of blackmail the youngest Madigan often practised. And later, Kate,
+looking most conventional and full-dressed in this nightgowned society,
+brought succor for the starving. They munched chocolate and camped
+comfortably, three on each bed, while Sissy told her adventures. When
+she came to the description of Von Hagen's fall, though still shuddering
+at the memory, she acted the incident so dramatically that Frances set
+up a howl, which was, however, most fortunately drowned by the ringing
+of the front-door bell.
+
+Split started to answer it, but her nightgowned state gave her pause.
+"Perhaps father'll go," she suggested.
+
+Kate shook her head. "He didn't come to dinner; he's been shut up in his
+room all day."
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Sissy. An old look, that washed all the
+self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.
+
+Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about
+to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a
+martyr.
+
+Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate
+anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember
+the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the
+usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young
+lives flowed full and free.
+
+But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied
+to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation
+not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was
+in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from
+Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the
+extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.
+
+Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they
+got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall,
+old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted
+to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City,
+Nevada, California, U. S. A."
+
+"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.
+
+"Well,--" Kate had been thinking,--"I'm Miss Madigan."
+
+"Whoop--hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the
+kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed it obligingly into
+Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.
+
+"Girls--it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in
+the quantity of material before her.
+
+"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of
+knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin,
+she began to put them on.
+
+"And ladies' clothes!" cried Sissy, dragging forth a long black cape.
+"'Here would I rest,'" she chanted, draping it about her and
+lugubriously mimicking Professor Trask as the Recluse in "The Cantata of
+the Flowers."
+
+"Let's do it! Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself
+into some Irish boy's jacket.
+
+"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical
+compulsion had been threatened.
+
+"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and
+Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and--"
+
+"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She had a much-feathered hat
+on her head and a crocheted lace shawl about her shoulders.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "'Here would I rest,' she chanted"]
+
+"_I_'ll be the Rose." Split, corrupted by her body's boyish environment,
+stretched her legs apart defiantly. "You can't sing it; you know you
+can't, Kate. You never could get up to G. If I'm not the Rose--"
+
+"Oh, well," said Kate, drawing on a pair of soiled, long light gloves
+she had pulled out of the box, "I'll be the Lily, then. Come on, Sis."
+
+"I won't," said Sissy, almost weeping. She knew she would. "I won't be
+the Recluse! I won't be the Recluse every time, just because you two are
+so greedy and--"
+
+"You know," said Kate, smothering a giggle, but not very successfully,
+"no one can do it as well as you."
+
+"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo,"
+chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?"
+
+"If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better
+take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing,
+anyway."
+
+"Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her
+eye made her junior dance.
+
+"You know I can't," she sniffled.
+
+"But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily
+duet," said Kate, putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack
+and opening it persuasively.
+
+"You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly
+moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time."
+
+"Well, you won't next time," said Kate, generously. "Will she, Split?"
+
+"Well, I won't sing it this time," declared Sissy, seating herself at
+the piano, yet making a last stand at the very guns.
+
+But Kate and Irene burst forth in the opening chorus with all the verve
+in the world. The Madigans never scorned expression when it was
+understood that they were acting. And the twins, still pulling stage
+properties out of the box, and even Frances, fantastically decorated
+with a torn Irish lace fichu over the bifurcated, footed white garment
+she still wore o' nights, joined joyfully in:
+
+    "'We are the flowers,
+    The fair young flowers,
+    That come at the voice of spring--'
+    DING--DONG!"
+
+It was a familiar old Madigan joke, always greeted with a shriek of
+laughter, to shout out the two notes of the accompaniment that
+punctuated the musical phrases. Its observance now put even Sissy in
+good humor, so that when the time came for the Recluse to make his
+appearance, she left the piano, and stalking miserably about with the
+preliminary cough with which the unfortunate Professor Trask was
+afflicted, she sang her doleful recitative.
+
+The Madigans were never literalists. They were of the impressionistic
+school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high
+imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of
+the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that
+killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves
+caricatures of the mannerisms of others, to nickname, to seize upon
+every peculiarity with their quick, observant, cruel young eyes and
+paint it in flesh-and-blood cartoons.
+
+Thus, when the Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft
+concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on
+the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it
+done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of
+the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily
+sang through her nose, which she wiped every now and then in a manner
+unmistakably that of Henrietta Blind-Staggers.
+
+"The Cantata of the Flowers" was never brought to a glorious completion
+by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult
+parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission
+between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a
+saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free
+fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's
+incurable tendency to sing off key. But that night it might have dragged
+its saccharine length of melody to the coronation of the Rose and a
+quick curtain if Miss Madigan had not walked right into the thick of it.
+
+"Golly!" gasped Sissy, while Irene dodged behind Kate, who quickly
+turned down the lamp, and a hush fell upon the rest.
+
+But Miss Madigan had been writing, or rather rewriting, letters. She had
+completely forgotten the heinous offense of the afternoon.
+
+"Will you mail a letter for me, Sissy, the first thing in the morning?"
+she asked, still preoccupied. "Why are you in the dark?"
+
+"We're just going to bed," remarked Sissy, with soothing demureness,
+taking the envelope from her aunt's hand and falling in with her mood,
+as one does with the mentally afflicted.
+
+When Miss Madigan, fatigued with the labor of composition, had gone back
+to her room, Kate turned up the light again. "Same thing, I s'pose?" she
+asked. "Circumstances-letter--huh?"
+
+"I s'pose so. 'T ain't sealed," said Sissy, with resignation. "But she
+always forgets to seal 'em." Then, suddenly inspired, she caught up
+Professor Trask's pencil lying on the piano, and on the vacant half-page
+at the end of Miss Madigan's letter she wrote in her best school-girl
+hand:
+
+    You--whoever you are--needn't bother to answer this.
+    None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's.
+    It 't only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and
+    we'll thank you to mind your own buisness.
+
+                                           _Sissy Madigan._
+
+She read her composition to the startled but, on the whole, approving
+Madigans, sealed the letter, and was ready for bed.
+
+They were all scampering through the long hall playing leap-frog--a
+specialty of Split's which her present costume facilitated--when
+Francis Madigan, candle in hand, came out of his room on his usual tour
+of nightly inspection. His short-sighted eyes fell upon Irene, a pretty,
+lithe, wavy-haired boy, before she and the twins bolted.
+
+"What boy have you got there?" he demanded. "Send him home."
+
+Kate took Frances up in her arms and covered the retreat; she knew how
+much the better part of valor was discretion.
+
+Sissy remained standing, looking up at him. When she was alone with her
+father she was conscious of her poor little barren favoriteship, though
+she dared not impose upon it. In the candle-light his harsh, rugged
+features stood out marked with lines of suffering.
+
+"It's all right, father," she said, with a quick choice of the lesser
+irritation for him. "He'll go--right away. Good night."
+
+"Good night, child."
+
+But she walked a step or two with him, slipping her hand at last into
+his, and pressing it tenderly.
+
+"Is--anything the matter, father?" she whispered.
+
+    [Illustration:
+      "She walked a step or two with him"]
+
+He threw back his head as though some one had struck him. It was not
+difficult to guess from whom the Madigans had inherited their fanatical
+desire to conceal emotion.
+
+Sissy was terrified at what she had done, yet the vague trouble lay
+quivering before her, though still unnamed, in his working face.
+
+"Father--I'm sorry," she sobbed.
+
+He pushed her from him, but gently, and she crept into her bed and
+pulled the clothes over her head, that the twins might not hear her
+strangled sobbing.
+
+
+
+
+"THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN"
+
+
+With a shrill whistle of recognition, Jack Cody ran down the hill to
+meet Split toiling up.
+
+The air is like ethereal champagne in Virginia City, and on a late
+summer's evening, after the sun's honeyed freshness has been strained
+through miles of it, it has a quality that makes playing outdoors
+intoxicating.
+
+Split, though, had not been playing. There was business on hand and she
+had been downtown to buy eggs for the picnic, with the usual result. She
+had never yet succeeded in bringing home an unbroken dozen, nor did she
+ever hope to; but she was really out of temper at the extraordinary
+dampness of the paper bag, to which her two hands adhered stickily. She
+walked slowly upward, holding the eggs far in front of her like a votive
+offering to the culinary gods, unconscious of the betraying yellow
+streaks that beaded her blue gingham apron.
+
+"Where you been, Split?" asked Cody, by way of an easy opening.
+
+"Down to the grocery. Mrs. Pemberton's not laying decently these days."
+
+"Mrs. Pemberton!"
+
+"Sissy's gray hen, you know. Sissy called her that 'cause she's so
+stuck-up and thinks she's better than any other hen in the yard.
+Besides, she's got only one chicken, and bosses him for all the world
+like Crosby."
+
+Cody nodded. "What time you going to start in the morning? Six?"
+
+"Uh-huh." Split dared not lift her eyes from the sticky trail that
+exuded from her.
+
+"Sure?" the boy demanded.
+
+"Sure--if only father don't keep us so long to-night that we can't get
+ready. We've got to be martyred to-night," she added gloomily.
+
+Cody looked his resentment and sympathy. Delicacy and the fear of
+betraying some social disability on his own part of which he was
+unaware--some neglect of training which might be considered essential in
+well-regulated families--forbade his inquiring precisely what the
+process was. To him "martyring" meant some queer rite whose main and
+malicious purpose it was to keep Split indoors of an evening when the
+high mountain twilight was going to be long, long; and when the moon
+that followed it would be so brilliant that one might read by its
+light--if he weren't too wise, and too fond of hide-and-seek--out in the
+silver-flooded streets made vocal by childish cries.
+
+"But it can't last the whole evening?" he asked appealingly, as she
+prepared to mount the steps, always accompanied by the silent yellow
+witness of her passing.
+
+She shook her head hopelessly, sniffing in a manner that showed plainly
+how little reliance she placed upon the generosity and judgment of
+adults. And Cody walked away, haunted by the tormenting vision of Split
+flying before him through the moonlit night: the only girl in town who
+had any originality about choosing hiding-places, or who could make a
+race worth while.
+
+The family was assembled when Split reached the library and sat down,
+rebelliously sullen, beside Sissy. That young woman, though, wore an
+expression of purified patience, a submissive willingness to kiss the
+rod, that was eminently appropriate, however infuriating to the junior
+Madigans. But Sissy had known that it was coming. She could have
+foretold the martyrdom; all the signs of yesterday prophesied it, and
+she was reconciled.
+
+It followed invariably that after the rare occasions when the pitiful
+curtain of his egotism had been blown aside by some chance breeze of
+destiny, and Francis Madigan had stood for a moment face to face with
+himself and his shirked responsibilities, he made the spasmodic effort
+to fulfil his paternal obligations, which the Madigans had learned to
+call their "martyring." He took from his library the book which had been
+most to him, which he had read all his life: for inspiration when he had
+been young and hopeful, for philosophy now that he was old and a
+failure. He was sincere in offering to his children the fruit of a great
+mind with comments by one that was sympathetic, able if not deep, and
+genuinely eager, for the moment, to share its enthusiasm.
+
+But the sight of all this helpless though secretly critical womanhood
+disposed attentively about him invariably, through association of ideas,
+brought to his mind every similar and abortive attempt he had made in
+this direction. When he opened the book to read aloud to them, he was
+always irritated, with that deep-seated irascibility which has its
+foundation in self-discontent, however externals may influence or add to
+it.
+
+Whatever Francis Madigan might have been, he was never intended for a
+pedagogue. His impatience of stupidity, his irritation at the slow,
+stumbling steps of immaturity, not to speak of his lack of judgment in
+his selection and his determination to persevere in reading aloud from
+the book of his choice, if he had to ram undigested wisdom whole into
+the mental stomachs of his offspring--all this would have deterred a
+less obstinate man. But Madigan, who had become a bully through weakness
+(forced to domineer unsuccessfully in his home by the conquering
+softness of his sister's disposition), had the bully's despairing
+consciousness of being in the wrong at the very moment of superficial
+victory; of being powerless in the very act of imposing himself upon his
+poor little women-folk; of recognizing the fact that, although he might
+lead them to the fountain of knowledge, he was unable to make them
+drink; and yet not daring to hesitate in his bullying, for fear that he
+might do nothing at all if he did not do this.
+
+Now that his conscience was quickened, Madigan insisted to himself that
+the culture of his daughters' minds must be attended to. So he read
+aloud from "The Martyrdom of Man"; and enjoyed the sound of his
+voice--the irresistible accents of the cultured Irishman--a pleasure
+which the world shared with him; but not a martyred world of small
+women, over whose heads the long-sounding, musical periods of the
+poet-historian rolled, dropping only an occasional light shower of
+intelligence upon the untilled minds below.
+
+"We will begin where we left off the last time," Madigan said harshly.
+He remembered how long it had been since "last time," and how much his
+audience had had time to forget. "Where was that? Were any of you
+interested enough to remember?"
+
+Miss Madigan looked up from her work, like an amiable but very silly hen
+who pretends to make a mental effort, yet, unfortunately, has nothing to
+make that effort with. Kate, with the consciousness that she was really
+the only one of Madigan's children capable of following the line of the
+historian's thought, flushed guiltily. Irene sat like a prisoner,
+looking out into the balmy evening. She could hear cries of "Free home!
+Free home!" from down yonder in the paradise of the streets, in Crosby
+Pemberton's voice. Even Crosby, whose unnatural mother was the only lady
+of Split's acquaintance who was prejudiced against playing in the
+streets--even Crosby was out. While she--
+
+"It was the fall of Carthage, wasn't it, father?" asked Sissy, sweetly.
+
+If a glance from Split could have slain, Sissy had been dead. It was not
+the Madigan policy to encourage Francis Madigan in his belief that the
+seeds he sought to sow fell on fertile soil. If they had to be martyred
+in one sense, they declined to be in another. Besides, they knew and
+detested Sissy's hypocritical desire to "show off."
+
+"It was, indeed, Cecilia," said Madigan, with a pathetic softening of
+his whole being. "'Tis a fine, stirring, terrible picture the historian
+gives us of the doomed city. Ahem!... 'And then, as if the birds of the
+air had carried the news, it became known all over northern Africa that
+Carthage was about to fall. And then, from the dark and dismal corners
+of the land, from the wasted frontiers of the desert, from the snowy
+lairs and caverns of the Atlas, there came creeping and crawling to the
+coast the most abject of the human race--black, naked, withered beings,
+their bodies covered with red paint, their hair cut in strange fashions,
+their language composed of muttering and whistling sounds. By day they
+prowled around the camp, and fought with the dogs for the offal and the
+bones. If they found a skin, they roasted it on ashes, and danced
+around it in glee, wriggling their bodies and uttering abominable cries.
+When the feast was over, they cowered together on their hams, and fixed
+their gloating eyes upon the city, and expanded their blubber-lips and
+showed their white fangs. At last-'"
+
+A piercing scream came from Frances.
+
+"Thousand devils!" Madigan burst forth, enraged at the interruption.
+
+It was only that Bep and Fom, in the midst of a finger conversation
+carried on politely with a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, had had their
+attention attracted by the ghastly word-picture made so vivid by their
+father's voice. So, wearying of the innocuous desuetude of things, it
+occurred to them to present for Frank's entertainment a bodily
+representation of what the words meant to their minds. Safe in the
+obscurity of the table-cloth's circular shadow, down on the floor they
+wriggled, they prowled, they cowered and gloated and expanded their
+blubber-lips and showed their fangs. If they did not utter abominable
+cries, it was only because that particular detail was not needed to send
+the smallest Madigan into hysterics.
+
+"Leave the room!" cried Madigan. "Leave the room, you ox!" looking
+wrathfully, but generally, down at the disturbance.
+
+And three small Madigans, feeling that they had paid a small price for
+freedom, crept and crawled to the door--the most abject of the Madigan
+race till they were fairly outside, when they became the most jubilant.
+
+"'At last,'" went on Madigan, a lingering growl of resentment in his
+voice, "'the day came. The harbor walls were carried by assault and the
+Roman soldiers passed into--'"
+
+"Father," interrupted Sissy, with the exasperating air of one who knows
+how soothing she is (like many a talented person, she was irretrievably
+ruined by her first success and she felt very intelligent)--"father, in
+what part of Rome was Carthage?"
+
+Behind her father's back Split mouthed a threat of vengeance and shook
+her fist at the interested Sissy for wilfully prolonging the session.
+But at Madigan's snort of disgust, the Indian profile of Split, below
+its bushy crown of red, shone out malevolently. She did not know what
+Sissy had done; she knew only that she had done something.
+
+Sissy met her glance, and returned it with dignity. "I didn't mean that,
+father, you know," she said priggishly. "I meant, of course, in what
+part of Carthage was Rome."
+
+"Oh, you did!" Madigan's smile was not pleasant.
+
+"Ye-es," said Sissy, uncertainly.
+
+"Well," said Madigan, explosively, "Rome was in the same part of
+Carthage as Carthage was of Rome."
+
+His jaw was set now, and his glowing dark eyes beneath their white
+shaggy brows as he sought his place in the book were not encouraging.
+But the enigmatic character of his response was not enough for Sissy,
+dazed, yet greedy for glory. She glanced from Split, in whose ear Kate
+was whispering something that seemed vastly to delight her, to her
+father, who had begun to read again.
+
+"I don't remember, father, please," she said as he paused a moment to
+clear his throat. "What part was that?"
+
+A sputtering giggle broke from Split. It was unlucky, for it turned
+Madigan's wrath upon her.
+
+"Outside!" he commanded, pointing to the door. "Outside, you ox!..."
+
+"'Six days passed thus,'" the reading began again. (In almost the moment
+the door had closed behind her, Split could be heard flying down the
+outside steps two at a time. That he was sorely tried, Madigan's voice
+showed plainly, and his shrunken audience looked apprehensively at one
+another). "'Six days passed thus and only the citadel was left. It was
+a steep rock in the middle of the town; a temple of the god of healing
+crowned the summit.' The god of healing, Cecilia," he put in, with a
+contempt that mantled the perfectionist's check with a resentful red,
+"means that particular deity--"
+
+A soft little snore came from Miss Madigan. Her head had fallen to one
+side, and the lamp-light shone on her soft, pretty, high-colored face,
+placid in its repose as a baby's.
+
+In the moment that Madigan paused and looked at her, Sissy's hand sought
+Kate's in terror. But the reader controlled himself with an effort,
+remembering possibly that, after all, it was not his sister but his
+daughters he was educating.
+
+"'The rock was covered with people,'" he went on, skipping the
+explanation he had intended giving to Sissy. And he read on for some
+minutes without interruption, becoming more and more interested himself
+in the vivid picture as it unrolled, and half declaiming it in his
+enthusiasm, with a verve that accounted for Sissy's successful rendition
+of "The Polish Boy" at school entertainments. "'The trumpets sounded,'"
+he sang out. "'The soldiers, clashing their bucklers with their swords
+and uttering the war-cry _Alala! Alala!_ advanced in--'"
+
+"Mercy me!" exclaimed Miss Madigan, waked by his realistic shout, and
+blinking her bright little eyes to accustom them to the light.
+
+"Anne," said Madigan, tensely, "if you are not interested, you--are not
+obliged to listen, of course. But it would be more--civil to withdraw
+if--"
+
+"Not interested?" she repeated, with gentle surprise, as she took up her
+crocheting again. "Why, it's very interesting--most interesting; don't
+you find it so, Kate?"
+
+"'A man dressed in purple rushed out of the temple with an olive-branch
+in his hand,'" Madigan began again, all the ardor gone from his voice.
+"'This was Hasdrubal, the commander-in-chief, and the Robespierre of the
+Reign of Terror. His--'"
+
+"Missy Kate--want chocolate--picnic--" Wong stood open-mouthed in the
+doorway. Consciousness of having interrupted the master, as well as
+amazement at beholding him out of his own room after dinner, was too
+much for him.
+
+"What do you want, Wong?" demanded Madigan, harshly.
+
+"Notting--oh, notting," murmured Wong, deprecatingly. "One picnic,
+sabe, t'-malla morning."
+
+"Irene--I mean Cecilia--Thousand devils!--Kate," stormed Madigan, in his
+rage forgetting his daughter's precise appellation, "go out into the
+kitchen and give your orders. If you had the least grain of common sense
+you'd know that the first duty of a housekeeper is to have some system
+about her work; to do things at the right time and not to interrupt the
+evening's entertainment." He gulped a bit at this, though Kate's dropped
+lids quickly hid the ironical gleam in her eye. "Well, why don't you
+go--and stay? You might as well, or you'll forget something else and
+interrupt us again."
+
+A desire to make herself look very numerous, intelligent, and
+appreciative possessed Sissy as the door closed on her big sister. She
+was in the familiar frame of mind in which she disapproved of her
+sisters, yet she was terrified lest, if she gave him time, her father
+might draw the same inference that she had.
+
+"Perhaps you'll let me read aloud for a while, father. Mr. Garvan often
+has me read things to the class," she suggested quickly, when she saw he
+was about to close the book.
+
+Madigan hesitated. A succession of infuriating trifles had beat upon
+his temper till it was worn thin. But Sissy's outstretched hand
+conquered merely by suggestion. He put the book before her, pointed to
+the place, got to his feet, and began pacing to and fro.
+
+"'Carthage burned seventeen days before it was entirely consumed,'" read
+Sissy. "'Then the plow was passed over the soil to put an end in legal
+form to the existence of the city. House might never be built, corn
+might never be sown, upon the ground where it had stood.'"
+
+She read well, did Sissy, as she did most things. Little by little
+Madigan's sharp, quick steps became less and less the bodily expression
+of exasperated nerves, and tuned themselves to the meter of that pretty,
+childish voice, intelligently giving utterance to the thoughtful
+philosophy that had always soothed him. It lost some of its familiarity
+and gained a new charm, coming from that small, round mouth which had an
+almost faultless instinct for pronunciation. A feeble germ of fatherly
+pride began to sprout beneath the soil upon which the child's
+intelligent reading fell like a warm, spring rain.
+
+"One moment, Cecilia." Madigan stopped in his walk, lifting an
+apologetic hand to excuse the interruption. "You read just now of 'the
+Britons of Cornwall gathering on high places and straining their eyes
+toward the west; the ships which had brought them beads and purple cloth
+would come again no more.' Now, to what does that refer?"
+
+Sissy's hands flew to her breast; and before she had time to conceal, to
+pretend, to affect, he had seen the blank expression of her face. You
+see, she had been merely reading; not thinking. The sound of her own
+voice had drowned the sense. To read intelligently a thing the
+comprehension of which was far over her head was the utmost this
+eleven-year-old could do. She had not the vaguest idea what she had been
+reading. It was all a blank!
+
+Madigan stood petrified; and the last little martyred ox, stuffing her
+apron into her mouth, that she might not weep aloud, hurried from the
+room.
+
+A moment longer Madigan stood. Then he looked at Miss Madigan. That
+lady's placid face had not changed a particle. She sat crocheting what
+she called a fascinator, her white bone needle moving harmoniously in
+and out of the blue wool. Had she heard a word that had been read? Her
+brother knew better than to ask. Did it make the least difference to
+her whether he read from "The Martyrdom of Man" or not?
+
+Madigan shut the book with a bang. The "martyring," boomerang that it
+had proved, was over.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The world seems new-born every summer morning in Virginia City. This
+little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd
+angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of
+the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright--an open, boundless
+breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the
+fresh, shining virginity of the new-created.
+
+It was the sense of a nature-miracle, and the desire to penetrate still
+farther and higher into the crystalline sky that crowned it, which sent
+the Madigans every summer toiling up Mount Davidson. They did not know
+it, but yearly the _Wanderlust_ seized them, and as all things in
+Virginia point one way, they followed that suggestion--upward.
+
+They were spared the usual struggle with Frances (who, after being
+coaxed, bribed, threatened, and bullied, had at last annually to be run
+away from), for the reason that Frank had not slept well after the
+martyring, and was still dreaming of creeping, crawling things with
+blubber-lips and gloating eyes when, in the pellucid dawn, Jack Cody
+found the Madigans waiting, in clean calicoes, perched on their
+bottommost step.
+
+The sun was barely over the top of Sugar Loaf, and the town, scantily
+shrubberied (for water costs as many dollars in Virginia as there are
+weeks in the year), lay sleeping in soft chill shadow below them,
+looking oddly picturesque and strange in the unfamiliar light.
+
+"Say," said Cody, "I think I see that Pemberton kid coming up Taylor. Is
+he coming along?"
+
+"No," said Sissy, promptly.
+
+"Yes," said Split, firmly.
+
+"Well, _I_ didn't ask him," from Sissy, with a haughty air of saying the
+last word. The Madigans were quite accustomed to being social arbiters
+in their own small world.
+
+"Well, I did," remarked Split, easily.
+
+A pugnacious red overshot Sissy's face. Crosby was her property, to
+browbeat and maltreat as seemed best to her. She felt that Irene's
+interference in a matter that was purely personal was unwarranted as it
+was intolerable.
+
+"He always has such good cream-tarts," explained Split.
+
+"Well, he can have 'em and keep 'em," declared Sissy, savagely, turning
+her back as Crosby yodeled a greeting and waved his hat gaily to her.
+
+Cody grinned. "I think that kid better stay at home. It won't be much
+picnic for him, will it, Sissy?"
+
+Sissy sniffed. "He's Split's company," she said loftily. "She'll make
+things pleasant for him."
+
+But Crosby, glad to be among the enticing Madigans at any price, and
+innocently joying in the picnic spirit that possessed him, came whooping
+to his fate.
+
+"Say," he said eagerly, putting down his basket with the air of one who
+has a good story to tell, "do you know, I almost got caught this
+morning. Ma said I wasn't to go, but I bet I wouldn't stay at home. So I
+told Delia to put up my lunch last night, and to put in a lot of those
+cream-tarts you like, Sissy--you used to like, Sissy...."
+
+But Sissy, actuated by a delicate desire not to interfere in the
+slightest with Split's plans for the entertainment of her guest, was
+deep in conversation with Jack Cody. Crosby's jaw fell. He saw her give
+her round tin lunch-bucket--the one he had so often carried to school
+for her--to Cody, to sling with his own upon a leather strap. And as he
+watched her start up the ravine carrying one end of the strap, and the
+washerwoman's boy the other, he wondered passionately within himself at
+the faithlessness and ingratitude of women.
+
+Wasn't it enough to have a reckoning with Madam Pemberton at the end of
+his day, without having that precious time utterly spoiled? He felt like
+turning back. Sissy knew well that there could be no picnic for him
+within the pale of her displeasure. The mountain air might be never so
+sweet with the wild sage perfuming it; the sun striping the shadowy town
+below with bloody bands might be never so promising; the mountain's
+peak, soft and deceitfully near, might be never so tempting--with Sissy
+chattering gaily in advance, ostentatiously ignorant of his very
+existence, the glory was cut out of Crosby's morn. It seemed, too, to
+him that he had never been so fond of her. His mother's disapproval of
+this Madigan since a certain episode (to avenge which cruel Sissy's
+thirst could never be slaked) had put the last touch to his devotion.
+That matron's pleasure in their intercourse hitherto had been the one
+drawback to his delight in it. In his eyes, his inamorata walked now
+with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that
+Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is
+proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being
+"the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.
+
+At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of
+water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other
+brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and
+shirts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came
+under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose
+mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first
+decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's.
+So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and
+white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace
+which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least
+masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its
+golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the
+assertive masculinity of her attire.
+
+It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had
+promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible
+desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older
+members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic,
+though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of
+the day he would realize that that course would have been the least
+painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was;
+not in the division-of-labor fashion, from which Cody's and Sissy's
+jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily
+along, far in advance.
+
+Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge
+boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling
+that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own
+bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have
+made him tender to the vicissitudes of sex as warranted by clothing),
+something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.
+
+"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke
+along. They'll never get to the top."
+
+Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in
+her nostrils. Her skirt was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies
+she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was
+outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punishing. The only thing that
+detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's
+opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose--not
+to agree.
+
+"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"
+
+As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther
+away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole
+that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the
+other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it
+delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up
+from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses
+Blind-Staggers,--blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue
+goggles,--had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a
+ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room
+conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon
+Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom,
+Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young
+lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting
+now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped
+hollow in the cone where the snow lies.
+
+From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for
+halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too
+exhausted to stop now.
+
+"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and
+hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.
+
+No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of
+grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of
+the heights behind the Comstock--only the bare little brown town far
+down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up
+with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam
+rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray
+mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and
+Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.
+
+Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the
+savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above
+her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her
+hands--a small, petticoated Balboa--to the world she had discovered.
+"It--it makes you want to scream," she stammered.
+
+"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want
+to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the
+sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.
+
+Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted
+her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's
+sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust
+that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner
+of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated
+the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.
+
+She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the
+high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the
+point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating brassily, gave vent
+to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into
+silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and
+when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way
+back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which
+he was one.
+
+Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her,
+was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where
+the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her
+solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking
+the sand out of her shoe.
+
+"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some
+cream-puffs for you."
+
+But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for
+Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently
+lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."
+
+With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a
+moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest
+puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gushing over her cheeks and
+chin.
+
+But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the
+purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's
+account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as
+the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting
+tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour
+without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion
+Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume
+is carried.
+
+Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the
+first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her
+terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the
+steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with
+truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with
+the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a
+handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she
+had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pass first. Yet
+she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind
+showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her
+foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water
+chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would
+not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's
+straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment
+his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure,
+relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured
+the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's
+tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there
+from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a
+spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew.
+In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of
+water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.
+
+It was all over with Sissy. Trembling with terror, she sat down,
+clutching the edge of the board beneath her, the world swimming away
+before her shut eyes, just as it did when one looked too long through a
+knot-hole at the flowing race in the flume beneath.
+
+Irene's giggle came faintly to her; she was too terrified to resent it.
+The murmur of voices that called her name, encouragingly, warningly,
+angrily, was not so loud as the chuckling of the water in the box which
+seemed to hurry her senses away. She lived through years of agony, in
+which she found herself wishing that she could only fall and end it.
+Then she felt the trestle bound beneath her, and she was waked by the
+touch of Crosby's hand.
+
+"Get up!" he said in a tone of command that reminded her of that
+grenadier his mother.
+
+She opened her eyes and saw that his face was white, but the glitter of
+determination in his eyes was so new and curious that it held her
+attention for the moment necessary to give her strength to obey. He
+almost pulled her to her feet, and then half dragged, half ran with her
+across. Yet within ten feet of the end, the trembling of his hand had
+communicated itself to her whole body. She watched the drops of
+perspiration fall from his pale face and, fascinated, followed them down
+with her eyes. Then wrenching her hand from his, she almost fell down
+again. It seemed to her her head swayed back and forth with such force
+as might bear her whole body with it, and she squatted down, shivering.
+
+It was a most humiliating finish to an exciting adventure, for when he
+strove to compel her again to rise, Crosby found that terror is
+contagious. He himself dared not stand. He squatted down in front of
+her, and on all fours the two crawled toward the bank. Sissy could have
+kissed the earth when her hands touched it.
+
+But it took her some time to recover. The sympathetic fussing of the
+Misses Bryne-Stivers she endured as in a dream. She even permitted Mr.
+Garvan to take her hand and help her walk for a time. But when they
+reached the first house and had turned down Taylor Street, she was so
+thoroughly herself that she contrived to let the rest pass her, and she
+rested till Crosby came up. She was walking beside him, with a sudden
+flattering kindness that almost turned his head, when he looked in the
+direction in which her eyes were fixed, and saw his mother in her
+phaeton pull up and beckon to him.
+
+He looked shyly at Sissy. He would have given much to be told that this
+forgiveness was not to be merely temporary, like others that had
+preceded it whenever Mrs. Pemberton might see and disapprove; that he
+was no longer to be flouted and scorned when there was nobody but Sissy
+herself to be glad of it.
+
+"The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic
+whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton--a comforting formula the Madigans
+had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her
+smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no threat in it.
+
+Relieved, forgiven, reinstated,--for there was a promise without words
+in his tyrant's good humor,--Crosby laughed out gaily. At that moment
+he had no more fear for Madam Pemberton than for the invoked Madame
+Guillotine.
+
+"S' long, Sissy," he cried, waving his basket to her as he went, a young
+aristocrat, to meet his fate.
+
+That night Sissy said her prayers in a rush. She wanted to give her
+undivided attention to plans of revenge on Split.
+
+
+
+
+KATE: A PRETENSE
+
+
+The lesser Madigans meant to stand no nonsense from Kate. Other girls'
+big sisters had been known to assume superiority as their skirts
+lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which
+younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might
+not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously
+willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible
+with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood
+over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the
+least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se--just let Kate try it!
+
+Kate did, being human, a Comstock girl when girls were in a delightful
+minority, and a Madigan. But, realizing the argus-eyed watch put upon
+her, and the forthright methods of her sister Madigans, she tried it
+secretly.
+
+To be sure, there was old Westlake,--he was at least thirty-five years
+old--whose intentions were quite apparent. He came up to play whist at
+the house whenever he was in town, upon which occasions Kate was always
+his partner; and he scolded her with the same proprietary freedom for
+leading a "sneak" suit as Francis Madigan did his sister--a lady who was
+never known to know what was trumps, and who smiled and blinked and
+blushed and made the same mistakes over and over again with a
+complacency that Madigan's fiercest thumps upon the table could not
+shake.
+
+But the Madigans forgave Kate her Westlake, for the pleasure she took in
+guying him, and the loyal frankness with which she let them into all the
+moves of the game. He was "The Avalanche" to her and to them, because of
+his avoirdupois, his slow movements, and the imperviousness to a joke
+with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little
+infinity of homely facetiae in which the Madigans lived and had their
+being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate
+against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to
+speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to her oldest niece!
+
+"Fly, the Avalanche is upon you!" was Sissy's dramatic way of warning
+her big sister that her suitor had been spied by the outpost coming up
+the steps.
+
+And on such occasions Kate could slip out of the side door and be safely
+inside the Misses Blind-Staggers's sitting-room by the time Westlake's
+heavy step made the porch shake--and Sissy, too--with laughter. But this
+was before she went to open the door.
+
+"Is your sister at home?" old Westlake asked confidently.
+
+"Which one--Irene? Yes, she's home." Sissy's small round face was
+simplicity and candor incarnate.
+
+"No," said old Westlake, uncomfortably. He had seen shrewdness once or
+twice behind the eyes where innocence now dwelt, and he only half
+trusted this demure, blank-faced child. "I mean your sister Katherine."
+
+"Oh!" Cecilia exclaimed, in gentle surprise. "Oh, no, sir, she's out."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+Old Westlake fancied he heard a mocking "indeed" that followed. In fact,
+an echo that had the queer effect of making him hear double seemed to
+accompany all his words. It came from the portieres, which were
+suspiciously bulky, and shook as though something more than the wind
+moved them.
+
+"And how soon will she be home?" he asked.
+
+"Kate? You mean Kate? Oh, I really do not know." Sissy pronounced her
+words with pedantic care--a permissible thing among Madigans when adults
+were to be guyed.
+
+Old Westlake (he was rather a handsome old fellow, with his regular
+features, his blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted
+uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this
+half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller
+Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small
+experience offered were either too simple or too complex.
+
+"She can't be intending to spend the whole day out?" he asked, conscious
+that he presented a ridiculous figure to the childish gray eyes lifted
+to his.
+
+"No, I don't suppose she can," agreed Sissy. "Won't you come in?"
+
+He followed her hesitatingly into the parlor and sat down, his eyes
+fixed upon the portieres over the front windows, which still appeared to
+be strangely agitated.
+
+"You--do you think it will be worth while--my waiting?" he asked
+helplessly, as Cecilia was modestly about to withdraw.
+
+She looked up at him with the bland look of intelligence which it takes
+a clever child to counterfeit.
+
+"Worth while waiting for Kate?" she asked in accents half puzzled, half
+reproachful.
+
+Old Westlake blushed to the roots of his close-cropped fair hair. He
+fancied he heard a muffled gurgle behind the portieres that wasn't
+soothing.
+
+"Oh--you mean, is she likely to come home soon?" added Sissy, gravely,
+eying his discomfiture. "I really do not know."
+
+"Is Miss Madigan in?" asked the desperate man.
+
+"Why, do you call her that? I told you she was out."
+
+"No; you told me Katherine was out. Is she in?" he asked eagerly.
+
+Sissy stared at him stupidly. He returned her stare contemplatively. He
+yearned to bribe her, but he didn't dare. She looked too old to be
+bought, too young to understand; yet he was sure she was neither.
+
+"Katherine, Kate, and Miss Madigan are out," said Sissy, didactically.
+"So are Kitty, Kathleen, and even Kathy--that's her latest; she wrote it
+that way in Henrietta Bryne-Stivers's autograph-album."
+
+The visitor looked bewildered. "I asked you whether your aunt is in,"
+he said, with some impatience.
+
+"I beg your pardon," retorted Sissy, ceremoniously. No Madigan begged
+pardon unless intending to be doubly offensive thereafter. "You asked me
+whether my sister was in."
+
+"Is--your--aunt--in?" demanded Westlake, with insulting clearness.
+
+"She--is--in. I'll--tell--her--you're--here."
+
+"Please." Westlake bit the word out, promising himself that his first
+post-nuptial act would be to shake this small sister-in-law well for her
+impertinence.
+
+And this was the pathos, as well as the absurdity of old Westlake--he
+was so confident.
+
+But he was not so confident that he did not long for an ally. And when
+Split stepped out from behind the portieres, with a barefaced pretense
+of having just come through the long French window from the porch, he
+straightway invited her to go to the circus that evening with him and
+Kate.
+
+There happened to be two sties on Split's left eye just then, and a
+third on the upper eyelid of the right one. But this, of course, was no
+reason for discouraging the overtures of a poor old man like Westlake,
+who, it appeared to Split, had some virtues, after all.
+
+That evening Sissy, who was playing holey down on Taylor (a famous
+button-string had Sissy, as token of her prowess; it had a sample of
+almost every buttoned frock worn in Virginia for the past ten years),
+watched the three as they set out for the tent far down at the foot of
+the hill. And three things occurred to her, as she stood looking after
+them, Bombey Forrest waiting vainly, meanwhile, for her to shoot: First,
+that if his desire was to propitiate the clan, old Westlake had selected
+the wrong Madigan: Split being not nearly so tenacious an enemy nor so
+loyal a friend as herself. Second, that that same Split looked "like a
+silly" with the white handkerchief bound over her left eye, and her
+right one swollen and teary. She wondered, did Sissy, that they should
+take such a fright with them. And thirdly, the censor of the family sins
+made a mental note to the effect that Kate Madigan was putting on
+altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an
+inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche;
+and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of
+Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she,
+Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated--if she had been invited to go
+to the circus. If only she had!
+
+It must not be supposed that the esthetic side of life for the Madigans
+was represented wholly by women's walking-matches and the circus. There
+was also the Tridentata.
+
+Of course the Tridentata--the name was supposed to have something
+to do with sage-brush--was very select. Naturally, for it had had
+its origin in Mrs. Pemberton's strenuous estheticism and double
+parlors--possessions of which few Comstockers could boast. But after the
+infant literary society had learned to stand alone, it adopted migratory
+habits, meeting now at the Misses Bryne-Stivers's cottage, now at Mrs.
+Forrest's over-furnished rooms, and occasionally even at the Madigans'.
+
+There was at least room enough at the Madigans; it was the one
+particular in which they were never stinted. The long, shabby parlor had
+sufficient seating-capacity, even if the chairs were not all, strictly
+speaking, presentable.
+
+"Shall I bring in the Versiye fotoy?" asked Split on one of the
+occasions when the meeting of the Tridentata necessitated a real
+house-cleaning in which the full corps of Madigans took part.
+
+"The Versailles _fauteuil_, Irene," replied Miss Madigan, doubtfully,
+"is not reliable. If I wasn't sure that Mrs. Pemberton, who has seen
+the real ones, would be sure to ask where it is, I'd keep it out; for
+the last time she came so near sitting on it while I was reading my
+paper on 'Home-keeping' that I got so nervous I left out all that part
+about the housewife's duty being, above all, to make a spiritual home:
+to diffuse about herself a home atmosphere, so that wherever she sat,
+wherever two or three gathered about her, there was the Sanctuary of the
+Church of Home, so to speak. And--"
+
+"Then you want me to bring it in?" Split had too much to do to listen to
+Tridentata culture. Her humble office was merely to make ready for the
+literary feast and modest bodily refreshment to come.
+
+It was one of the contradictions of Split's nature--her intense
+occasional domesticity and the practical good sense that marked her home
+economies. She rose now, basin in hand. Her sleeves were rolled up, her
+bushy hair, a troublesome half-length now, was bound up in a towel. She
+had been scrubbing and polishing the zinc under the stove, and she was
+as happy as she was executive. She flew about trilling "The Zingara,"
+with a smudge on her chin and a big kitchen-apron tied about her waist,
+looking like a dirty little slavey; yet putting the mark of her
+thoroughness upon everything she touched and Miss Madigan overlooked.
+
+"The big rug from your room is to go over the hole by the window?" she
+asked perfunctorily, being half-way through the hall at the time.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad you remembered it," said Miss Madigan. "Mrs. Forrest
+tripped in that hole the last time. I thought it was exceedingly
+impolite of her to call attention to it that way, because--"
+
+"Shall I turn the couch-cover?" demanded Split.
+
+"I don't see how you can," said Miss Madigan, helplessly. "It's worn on
+the other side."
+
+But with a tug Split had drawn it off, pillows and all, and she flew
+up-stairs, carrying Kate in her wake to help her pull down a portiere
+which she intended transforming into a couch-cover.
+
+Things sentient as well as material were accustomed to doing double duty
+at the Madigans' on Tridentata nights. When Francis Madigan, forewarned
+that his bell would often be rung that evening, but that he was not
+expected to resent the insult, had retreated to his castle and pulled up
+the drawbridge behind him, the slavey, with Sissy as assistant, became
+doorkeeper, and, later, butler. Critics, of course, these two were ex
+officio; and from their station out in the chilly hall, they listened to
+and mocked at the literary program, which Miss Madigan had entitled, "A
+Night of All Nations."
+
+The opening duet between Maude and Henrietta Bryne-Stivers they had
+heard before. Few people in Virginia, indeed, had not.
+
+"Trash!" Sissy pronounced it in Professor Trask's best manner.
+
+The reading from "Sodom's Ende," in the original, by the traveled Mrs.
+Pemberton, was fiercely resented by her audience outside the gates. It
+always made a Madigan furious to hear a foreign tongue; for, apart from
+the affectation of strange pronunciations, the deliberate mouthing of
+words (and you couldn't make Sissy Madigan believe that Mrs. Ramrod
+understood half of what she was reading in that guttural, heavy tongue),
+there was the impugnment of other people's lack of linguistic
+accomplishment.
+
+The critical paper on Daudet that followed was read by Miss Henrietta
+Bryne-Stivers. While it was in progress the two Madigans out in the hall
+each read an imaginary paper on the same topic, finishing with that
+identical courtesy which Henrietta had imported from Miss Jessup's
+school in the city. But Split tripped Sissy as she was bowing over low,
+and she fell, as softly as she could, to the floor. Miss Madigan looked
+out with a "S--sh!" Sissy cast off all blame in virtuous dumb-show, and
+in the pause the two heard Dr. Murchison's voice as Henrietta passed him
+and the door, on her triumphant way back to her seat.
+
+"Allow me to compliment you, Miss Henrietta," said the old doctor,
+pleasantly excited by so youthful a lady's literary discrimination. "You
+are really fond of Daudet, then?"
+
+Henrietta blushed. "Oh, no, indeed, doctor!" she said deprecatingly. "At
+Miss Jessup's we girls were not permitted to read him, you know."
+
+"Ah, I see," murmured the doctor. "Only to write about him?"
+
+"Miss Jessup thought it was more--fitting, with the French authors,"
+observed Henrietta.
+
+"So it is," agreed Murchison, dryly. "So it is. The excellent Miss
+Jessups--how well they know!"
+
+"He's guying her," chuckled Sissy, making a mental vow to read Daudet or
+die in the attempt. "And she doesn't know it."
+
+"Hush!" came from Split.
+
+In a tenor a bit foggy, but effectively sympathetic, old Westlake was
+singing, "Oh, would that we two were maying!"
+
+Sissy put her eye to the crack of the door, and Split, watching her, saw
+her round face grow red and indignant.
+
+"What is it?" she whispered, squirming till she too had an eye glued to
+the crack.
+
+"Look!" exclaimed Sissy, disgustedly.
+
+Straight in their line of vision sat Kate, and upon her old Westlake's
+eyes were ardently fixed as he sang.
+
+"It's--it's not decent," declared Sissy, wrathfully.
+
+"He does look like a calf." Split grinned. Kate looked very pretty in
+that white cashmere embroidered in red rosebuds, which had been made
+over from the box from Ireland, Split said to Sissy, and so was
+deserving of forgiveness, she hinted; for when one had a new frock--
+
+Sissy, the sensible, snorted unbelievingly. What gown had ever affected
+her?
+
+"But I'll get even with him," she said, stealing on tiptoe down the
+hall. "Just you watch!"
+
+Split, her nose in the crack of the door, watched. The Avalanche had
+finished his first verse and begun the second, when Sissy appeared in
+the parlor, very modest and retiring, walking behind chairs and effacing
+herself with an ostentation that could not but attract all eyes. She
+stopped at Miss Madigan's chair, asked a question,--which Split knew
+well was utterly irrelevant and immaterial,--and received an answer in
+Aunt Anne's company manner: a compound of sweetness and flustered
+inattention which no one could mimic better than Sissy herself.
+
+Then she withdrew, slowly and by a tortuous route which brought her just
+beside him at the moment Westlake stopped singing. Without a word, yet
+with a gracious instinct for the momentary confusion in which the
+performer found himself, his seat having been taken while he sang,
+Cecilia pulled out another from the wall and moved it slightly toward
+him.
+
+The little attention was offered so naturally, with such engaging
+demureness, that Mrs. Pemberton--whom the social amenities in children
+ever delighted--almost loved Sissy Madigan at that moment. So, by the
+way, did Split, out in the hall, her eye at the crack of the door, her
+feet lifting alternately with anticipative rapture. For it was the
+Versailles _fauteuil_ that Sissy had so sweetly selected for old
+Westlake. And when the big fellow came down to earth with a crash,
+rising red and confused from the debris, Sissy was already out in the
+hall. She arrived at the crack in time to see Kate stuff her
+handkerchief into her mouth and hurry to the window, her shoulders
+shaking, while Miss Madigan flew to the rescue.
+
+It took a recitation in Italian by Mrs. Forrest to rob Sissy Madigan,
+judge and executioner, of her complacency after this. Then Aunt Anne
+recited "The Bairnies Cuddle Doon" charmingly, as she always did, but
+most Hibernianly, with that clean accent that makes Irish-English the
+prettiest tongue in the world. After which she received with smiling
+complacency the compliments of Mrs. Forrest, who told her that an ideal
+mother had been lost to the world in her.
+
+Outside, two cynics listened with a bored air. They felt that they
+required a stimulant after this, so they made a hurried visit to the
+dining-room, thereby escaping Mr. Garvan's reading of "Father Phil's
+Collection." But when Henrietta Bryne-Stivers delivered "Blow, Bugle,
+Blow," changing from speaking voice to the sung chorus with a composure
+that was really shameless, the critics out in the hall received that
+insulting shock which novelty inflicts upon the provincial, which is
+the childish, mind. They revenged themselves in their own way, mouthing
+and attitudinizing, caricaturing every pose which Miss Henrietta had
+been taught, by the instructor of Delsarte at Miss Jessup's, was grace.
+They were caught in the midst of their saturnalia of ridicule by Kate,
+who promptly exploded at their uncouth, dumb merriment.
+
+"Aunt Anne wants you, Sissy," she said when she got her breath.
+
+In an instant Sissy was sobered. It wasn't possible that she was to be
+sent to bed before supper! To be a waiter was the height of happiness
+for Sissy.
+
+"It's because of the Versiye fotoy," giggled Split, as she ran off to
+the dining-room.
+
+"It isn't, is it?" whispered Sissy to Kate. And Kate shook her head
+reassuringly, and waved her in. She couldn't answer audibly, for Dr.
+Murchison was tuning up his sweet old violin, while Maude Bryne-Stivers
+offered to accompany him on the piano.
+
+But Murchison knew too much of the manners and methods of Jessup's
+Seminary, as revealed by its showiest pupil.
+
+"Thank you, thank you, Miss Maude, but this is a very old-fashioned and
+a very simple entertainment I'm going to give. Just the things that I
+play to myself when I'm weary of listening to humanity tell of its ills
+and aches--the egotist! Then I look down into the beautifully clean
+inside of my fiddle, its good old mechanism without a flaw, and listen
+to the things it has to tell.... Thank you, just the same, Miss Maude;
+this is not a theme worthy of your brilliant rendition, but, as I said,
+a simple, old-fashioned playing of the fiddle. I'll supply the
+old-fashioned part, and Sissy here can do the simple accompaniment, if
+she will."
+
+If she would! Sissy was so gaspingly happy and proud that she forgot
+even to pretend that she wasn't. Seating herself, she let her trembling
+fingers sink into the opening chord, while the old doctor's bow sought
+the strains of "Kathleen Mavourneen," of "Annie Laurie," the "Blue Bells
+of Scotland," and "Rose Marie."
+
+The unspoken sympathy that existed between these two flowed now from the
+bow to Sissy's fingers, and made a harmony as pretty as was the sight of
+the old man and the happy child looking up at him. Sissy Madigan was
+conscious that the doctor knew her--almost; that, nevertheless, she
+occupied a place quite unique in his heart. And she loved passionately
+to be loved, this hypocrite of a Madigan, who jeered and jibed at any
+demonstration of affection. A sense of being utterly at harmony with the
+world possessed her now; the fact that she was "showing off" was far,
+far in the background of her consciousness, when all at once she
+happened to glance out through the hall door.
+
+She had left it ajar behind her, expecting Kate to follow her in. But
+Kate, evidently, had not followed. She stood out there alone with Mr.
+Garvan, her arms behind her, her slender figure drawn up beneath the
+swinging hall lamp, her pert little head, circled by the braids she wore
+coiled clear around it when she wanted to be very grown-up, upturned to
+the master, her every feature stamped with coquetry.
+
+Sissy shut her lips firmly--and the wrong note she struck marred the
+doctor's finale. It was evident that Kate Madigan needed looking after.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She did; and yet no one but Kate and those she experimented upon could
+help her to find herself.
+
+A wilful Madigan, intoxicated with her first taste of a new pleasure,
+was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was
+preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity
+of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural
+precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been
+pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet
+the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had a way of
+proclaiming the fact that she read everything her father did. (Madigan,
+marooned by his misfortunes in the most picturesque setting, where men
+were living the most picturesque lives, turned his back upon it all and
+found the action his dull days were denied in the elder Dumas.) By this
+Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped,
+too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit--the least bit--of
+suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably
+unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure
+may be, read in translation, by the light of such purity and innocence
+as hers.
+
+But she was pert, was Kate, and piquant; she presumed upon her youth,
+upon her age. She was a child when you expected her to be a woman, and a
+woman where you looked for the child. No dream of romance was romantic
+enough to hold her fickle soul constant to it--to satisfy the hopes of
+her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and
+poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche
+and crude, sitting in judgment--as cynical, as critical a spectator as
+Sissy herself--upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the
+flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which
+denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she
+was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which
+convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan,
+and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with
+a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet,
+for the woman misunderstood--whom she, in her crude purity, understood
+least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed
+with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to
+burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young
+innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or
+stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is
+black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young
+inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and
+yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a
+mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the
+irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.
+
+Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a
+woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint,
+pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing
+its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with
+full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish--driven to that extremity
+by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be
+frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a
+blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature;
+pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in
+ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for
+company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to
+whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things
+invisible to the world below.
+
+But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent
+thither by her auntly sense of responsibility, and brought it back with
+her. It led them straight to Warren Pemberton's office, and Pretense
+fled like a shy shadow before the sun when Reality looked at her
+through Pemberton's cold, dull eyes.
+
+"Miss Madigan, Mr. Pemberton. My niece Kate," was the lady's
+introduction as they entered.
+
+The red-faced, heavy little man, too important a personage to be
+expected to contribute socially to the life of the town, had been
+looking at Miss Madigan as though he knew he ought to remember having
+met her. She wanted something, of course. Everybody wanted something
+from Warren Pemberton, King Sammy's viceroy, in charge of his mining
+interests and his political plantations. But he brightened at the
+formula, recollecting having heard it before from the same lady's lips,
+and promptly placed her in the category of small political favors.
+
+"I remember you, Miss Madigan--of course," he stammered. "Remember the
+little girl, too. Crosby's flame, eh?"
+
+Kate flushed, struck dumb with the insult, and her black-gray eyes
+gleamed handsomely with anger. After getting herself up in her most
+mature fashion to be mistaken for Sissy!
+
+"Why, Mr. Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity
+to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan who--for whom--"
+
+"Oh, excuse me." Pemberton sat rubbing his chin and silently blinking at
+the Miss Madigan for whom his influence had been invoked. She felt he
+was weighing her youth and inexperience against the thing that had been
+asked for her. And the Madigan in her fiercely resented it; was tempted
+to confirm his doubts by a saucy flippancy that would relieve her
+impatience of a false position. But there was that other Madigan in her
+to be reckoned with, that new one, on the reverse of whose shining,
+romantic shield a plain, dull, tenacious sense of duty was slowly
+spelling itself into legibility.
+
+"Kate's really very clever, Mr. Pemberton," said Kate's aunt, tactfully;
+and the girl's teeth clicked together, in her effort to control her
+irritation. "And in some ways she is much older than her years. She will
+graduate, you know, this year at the head of her class; she passed first
+in the examination, and really, in a family where there are so many
+girls--"
+
+"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted the great man. "You told me all about
+that, and I--"
+
+"And you've had time to realize just how extraordinary a creature I am
+and how pitiful a case ours is! Am I too brilliant altogether to be
+wasted on school-teaching?" Wrath tingled in Kate's voice. She heard
+Miss Madigan's gasp of horror, and could imagine the fishy
+disconsolateness of her expression. And she saw the red-faced little man
+opposite her start, as at the injection of a foreign tongue into the
+interview.
+
+"Eh--what? Oh, yes," he said dully. "I mean--no. It'll be--it's all
+right."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Pemberton, how can I thank you!" Miss Madigan clasped her
+hands.
+
+"Yes; I spoke to Forrest yesterday, and--and, of course, Murchison's
+willing," went on the little man, gravely. "But there's no vacancy just
+now, so they'll arrange to appoint substitutes. It's the way they do in
+cities, I understand. And Miss Cecilia here will be--"
+
+"My name, Mr. Pemberton, is Kate!"
+
+"And Kate's exceedingly grateful." Miss Madigan gazed amazed at her
+niece; she didn't look grateful.
+
+"Not at all; not at all," murmured Pemberton, feeling for his papers
+helplessly. "I'm so busy--"
+
+"It--is good of you," stammered Kate, rising. "I am--very much obliged
+to you." She held out a hand to him that was cold to the fingertips. All
+at once she felt so old, so young, so niched forever in a somber, gray
+life, so settled, so bound up by small formalities, so miserably unlike
+a Madigan!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet the Madigan in Kate waked with a defiant brightness when the first
+call came that took her temporarily over the threshold of the new life.
+She left her own school-room, where her role was as congenial and
+irresponsible as Sissy's, with an air of importance that roused envy in
+her mates' hearts.
+
+The very pretense rallied her, excited her, inspired her to continue to
+pretend after she had left her audience behind her. And though she
+entered the lower class-room, of which she was to have charge for a day,
+with a terrified feeling of being thrown to the lions, she faced the
+undisciplined mob that licked its lips in anticipation of a feast on raw
+young substitute with a flash in her eye that promised battle first.
+
+And she did make a hit at the beginning, thanks to her sister and
+present pupil, Bessie, who was invariably late to school.
+
+To Bep, the aspect of her own sister in a position of authority was the
+hugest absurdity, and when the blonde twin sauntered in, tardy, as
+usual, she joined the class as one of the lions. She intended to give
+Kate distinctly to understand that she was mixed primary pupil first
+and a Madigan afterward; that the substitute might expect no mercy from
+her on the pitiful plea of relationship.
+
+Bep's attitude was very Madigan; the only drawback to it was that it
+left out of the reckoning the fact that she had a Madigan to deal with.
+
+"Elizabeth Madigan," said the substitute, in the clear, high, formal
+tone that, in itself, was sufficient to sever all bonds of kinship,
+"where is your excuse for being late?"
+
+Bep's blue eyes blinked. The impudence of Kate to talk that way to her!
+
+"I ain't got any. Miss Walker never--"
+
+"Miss Walker isn't teaching to-day," remarked the substitute, in the
+patient tone which the enlightened have for dullness. "She is ill and I
+am teacher here. Where is your excuse?"
+
+Bep felt the silence grow around her. She saw the whole school drop its
+mirth and its employments to watch this duel between Madigans.
+
+"Why, you know very well, Kate Madigan--" she began hotly.
+
+A sharp ring on the bell at the teacher's desk cut Bep's eloquence
+short. "If you have anything to say to me, little girl, you will address
+me as Miss Madigan."
+
+The audacity of it struck Bep dumb. Call that slim girl Miss Madigan?
+She'd like to see herself!
+
+"You will go home, Elizabeth," the substitute continued, unconcernedly
+making her way to the blackboard as though this life-and-death affair
+were a mere incident in her many duties, "and bring me back a written
+excuse for your tardiness."
+
+Bep set her teeth. "You know I had to go an errand for Aunt Anne; you
+saw me yourself," she muttered.
+
+"A _written_ excuse, I said."
+
+"I can't get any." Yet Bep rose. She felt the ground slipping from under
+her.
+
+"Then I am sorry to say," remarked the substitute, firmly, "that I shall
+not be able to have you in my class to-day. Leave the room, Bessie....
+Now, children, the first thing to do in subtraction--"
+
+Bessie walked slowly up the aisle and toward the door. With the prospect
+of a double disciplining, at home and at school, too, she dared not
+rebel. Yet wrath smoldered within her. She came to where the substitute
+stood at the board, calmly explaining the process of "borrowing," and
+the resolution to regard her as an undeserving stranger was tempered by
+Bep's desire to inflict an intimate, personal insult.
+
+"I wouldn't be so afflicted as you," she growled under her breath, like
+a small Mrs. Partington, misapplying her big word in her wrath, "for all
+the world. And I'll get even!"
+
+A gleam of quite unofficial laughter lit the substitute's eye. "You mean
+'affected,' my little girl, not 'afflicted,'" she said clearly, pausing
+pedagogically, chalk in hand. "Look up the difference in your
+dictionary, and if you can't understand, come to me and I'll explain it
+to you--after you bring your excuse."
+
+And Bep brought her excuse. The substitute, her cheeks glowing with
+excitement, yet calm-voiced and pretending valiantly, saw the door open
+nearly an hour later, and a hand thrust through waving an envelop, as
+though it were a lightning-rod that might attract the storm of her wrath
+away from the one who carried it.
+
+Gravely, even encouragingly, Miss Kate Madigan read a prayer from Miss
+Anne Madigan that the teacher would kindly excuse the tardiness of
+Elizabeth, her niece. She placed it on file religiously, like a
+confirmed devotee to red tape, and resumed her lesson to the baby
+class, with a matter-of-course air that completed the routing of Bep.
+
+But there was still another relative in the mixed primary--Frances. For
+half a day the smallest of Madigans was supposed to be doing
+kindergarten work, with a mild infusion of the practical in the shape of
+a-b-c's.
+
+It did not occur to this young lady to try to disown the substitute. On
+the contrary, she was exceedingly proud of her proprietary interest in
+the teacher. She leaned her plump hand upon that august person's knee in
+all the easy charm of intimacy when the baby class gathered about her,
+and was so intoxicated by reflected glory that she forgot the two
+letters of the alphabet she was supposed to know.
+
+There was one thing no Madigan--not even Kate--could pretend to: to be
+patient was beyond them all, talented as they were.
+
+"It's 'B,' Frank!" the substitute cried, in her exasperation forgetting
+the dignified demeanor she had adopted. "Say 'B,' 'B,' you stupid!"
+
+In that terrible moment Frank realized that there were drawbacks to
+being too well acquainted with the teacher. Her eyes filled with tears
+of chagrin. "'B, B, you stupid!'" she sobbed.
+
+And a quick, clear laugh from the substitute completed the
+demoralization of the mixed primary. It was not, strictly speaking, "in
+order" when Mr. Garvan visited it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oh, to be out of school, at the end of that first day of adulthood! To
+be unwatched, to be free, to be little and young, if that pleased one!
+To walk up the hill and along the main street, and then, just as one was
+about to turn the corner prosaically and mount still higher--then to
+come face to face with a creature so elegant, so visibly "dressed," that
+no gambler in town could outshine him. By sheer good luck, to have been
+introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed
+primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr.
+Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special
+privileges granted school-children at the "high-class minstrel
+performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the
+timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his
+saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's
+hesitation,--the woman in one stifling both the child's and the
+substitute's hesitation,--to allow the gaudy stranger to walk beside one
+the length of C Street. And though the sidewalk was crowded, for stocks
+were up, and one had to wriggle one's way through the people packed
+tight in front of the brokers' offices, yet, in the very teeth of the
+townsfolk, to joy shamelessly in flirtation with this gorgeous, shining,
+flattering stranger--a social outlaw, as well as a bird of passage, the
+very disrepute of whose profession made temptation more subtly sweet!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Split," whispered Sissy, her voice muffled with shame,--it was a week
+later,--"Kate walked with a minstrel! What shall we do?"
+
+"Did she? Who told on her--Mrs. Ramrod? Well," added Split, out of the
+depths of experience, "it must have been that day she substituted."
+
+
+
+
+OLD MOTHER GIBSON
+
+
+Imprisoned in skirts, Jack Cody was awaiting his mother and relief, when
+there came a knock at the door, and a voice distinctly not Jane Cody's
+said:
+
+"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, but your town's so jolly dark, I believe
+I've lost my way. I'm looking for--My word, what's that!"
+
+A parabola of light had suddenly shot out athwart the soft black night.
+It seemed to come from the hill to the left, and it was accompanied by
+the tinkle of shattered glass.
+
+"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned
+longingly upward.
+
+"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish
+face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so
+yearningly--a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing
+figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the
+shrill excited laughter of children.
+
+"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on--"stranger
+even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for
+the Madigans?"
+
+"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's
+cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high
+carnival.
+
+"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure
+before him.
+
+"Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque
+dancing shadows.
+
+"Eh?--I beg your pardon, I--I don't understand. Just what has happened?"
+asked the stranger.
+
+"Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing
+Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house
+afire."
+
+"Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in
+striving to fathom a local mystery.
+
+"Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it
+every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em."
+
+"You appear to know them." There was a smile hidden beneath the voice;
+but Jack was thinking, not of the questioner, indistinguishable in the
+darkness, but of the mad carnival up yonder on the hill.
+
+"Yep. That's Split," he said. "That one--see--with the bushy lot of
+hair, singing and cake-walking in front. She can do a cake-walk better'n
+any nigger I ever see."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"That's Frank, the baby--the one that's screamin' so. You can tell her
+squeals; they're laughin' ones, you know."
+
+"I suppose I ought to know. Anyway, I'm glad to be told."
+
+"Over on the side there, where there's a kind of blotch, is the twins;
+they must be fighting. Don, the dog, 's mixed up in it somehow."
+
+"My word!" exclaimed the man, softly, to himself.
+
+"That's Kate dancing round on the porch, and the one standing high-like,
+right next to the fire, with her arms up stiff, as if she was running
+the whole show, sort of--of--"
+
+"A priestess, say, invocating the Goddess of Kerosene!"
+
+"Huh?--Well, that's Sissy."
+
+"Oh, is it? Tell me--is she nice--Sissy?"
+
+"What?" asked the boy, so surprised that he withdrew his attention from
+on high and stared out at the man on the door-step.
+
+There came a laugh out of the darkness. "It is an odd question, but then
+everything is so odd out here, I half hoped you wouldn't notice it. But
+you do know them, evidently. I wonder--do you mind going up there with
+me and showing me the way?"
+
+But his last question had suddenly recalled to Jack Cody the reason why
+he wasn't at that moment one of the dancing black figures on the hill.
+The boy looked from his mother's wrapper to the man's face, growing more
+distinct now, out on the door-step, and the amused expression he saw
+there his sore egotism attributed to a personal cause. So he promptly
+slammed the door in the man's face.
+
+There was an instant's pause out in the blackness, made denser now that
+the candle's light from the cabin was cut off; then a short, nonplussed
+laugh.
+
+"Miles, old chap," the young man was saying to himself, as he turned
+cautiously to jump from the stoop and mount the hill, "this is Bedlam
+you've fallen into--this mad little mining-town ten thousand miles off
+in a brand-new corner of the world, all hills and characters! Now, what
+might be the sex of that animal you were talking to? And what in the
+name of peace are these Madigans? Are they the ones you're look--Steps,
+as I value my immortal soul!" he exclaimed, rubbing his shin where he
+had struck against the wandering Madigan stairway. "It would not have
+surprised me, now, if I had had to climb that hill on my hands and
+knees, and stand on my head when I got to the door, to knock at it with
+my heels!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Madigan's demeanor was beautiful to see. Just a bit--oh, the least
+bit of I-told-you-so in her manner, but also a generous willingness to
+postpone the acceptance of apologies due to one long misunderstood, and
+to take for granted the family's obligation.
+
+"The estate must be worth at least ten thousand a year," she confided in
+her delighted perturbation to Frances, as she curled her hair. And Frank
+looked up at her, soulful and uncomprehending, and a bit cross-eyed, for
+the curl dangling down over her nose. "He'll marry Kate, of course--I
+had no idea he was so young. He'll just be the savior of the whole
+family. It's a providence,--Miles Madigan's dying when he did,--and
+wasn't it fortunate that Nora sent my letter back?... You will be good
+at the table, Frances, and show cousin Miles how nicely you can use your
+fork?... He is practically a cousin.... Have you washed your hands?"
+
+"Hm-mm," murmured Frank, mendaciously. And then, as Aunt Anne appeared
+to doubt her word, "Just you ask God if I haven't," she suggested
+solemnly, carefully putting her hands behind her.
+
+But Miss Madigan had no time to put questions to so distant an
+authority. She had Wong to placate--Wong with his wash-day face on,
+grim, ill-tempered, hurried, defying the world to put even the smallest
+additional burden on his shoulders on Monday. And Miles Morgan just
+arrived from Ireland!
+
+And Francis talking to him in the library, in that distant, watchful,
+uncompromising way of his, that was just as likely as not to send the
+young man off in a huff.
+
+"One needn't insult a man just because he's rich and a relative!" Miss
+Madigan's exclamation was uttered aloud unconsciously, so excited was
+she. It ended with a gasp, as Sissy collided with her on the way from
+peeking through the half-open library door at her father and his guest.
+
+It was the bedroom, Kate's and Irene's, that Sissy was bound for; for
+there, in solemn conclave, the junior Madigans were assembled, waiting
+for their scout's report.
+
+"He's big--but not so big as the Avalanche," she began the moment she
+had shut the door behind her and faced the questioning eyes that
+commanded her to stand and deliver. "He's straight, too, but not so
+poker-stiff as Mrs. Ramrod. He's got a big haw-haw voice, and scrubs
+every word he says with a tooth-brush before he says it. His hands are
+as white--as white; and they're cleaner than Crosby Pemberton's. He's
+got a tan shirt on, plaited in front, and every time Aunt Anne moves
+he's up like a jumping-jack till she gets sat down again. He says 'My
+word!' and 'in the States'--like that. He's got a mustache the color of
+your hair, Split, a scrubby, stiffy little mustache. His eyes are little
+twinkling things, and I believe--" she paused in her indictment to give
+the criminal the benefit of the doubt--"I do believe he had gloves on
+when he first came! I won't be sure; but, anyway, I hate him."
+
+A gratified sigh rose from the Madigans assembled. It was good to have
+definite information, to know that this Miles Morgan was hatable. For
+the Madigans loved to hate any one who could put them under
+obligations--when they did not spend their very souls in a passion of
+gratitude to him. But for this interloping, distant relative from
+foreign shores they were prepared. They were ready to outrage him, to
+throw his patronage in his teeth, if he dared offer it, to out-Madigan
+the Madigans, if that were necessary; to disgust him and satisfy their
+pride, wounded by the insolence of his prosperity. Yes, it was good to
+hear Sissy's frank declaration of war. For war was as the breath of the
+Madigans' nostrils. They knew themselves there, and, though they might
+have trusted Sissy, they had feared for a moment that her report might
+not be all they had hoped.
+
+"We'll show him," said Split.
+
+"A patronizing, affected Irishman!" snorted Sissy, informally now that
+her official duties were ended.
+
+"He thinks he'll come out here and run the whole family," said Fom,
+aggrieved.
+
+"And show off how rich he is, and turn up his nose at things," said Bep,
+"and boss us. I'd like to see him try it!"
+
+"And be shocked at what we don't know, and what we do do, and what we
+haven't seen and learned. I dare him just to say 'abroad' to me!" cried
+Kate, with a flash in her eye.
+
+A chorus of groans went up from the indignant assemblage.
+
+"Aunt Anne," put in Frank, a bit puzzled, "says he's the savior of the
+fam'ly. What's a--"
+
+"The savior of the family! The savior!" mocked Sissy, genuflecting
+sarcastically. "The savior of the family will have you sent to a
+convent, Split, 'where young ladies are taught to behave properly.' The
+savior'll get a nursemaid for you, Frank, and you'll have to go about
+always holding her hand and wearing socks in the English style that'll
+show your bare, naked legs and--"
+
+"I won't! I won't!" Tears of terror stood in Frank's eyes.
+
+"The savior'll put a stop, Fom, to your--Kate Madigan, are you changing
+your dress?" Sissy's voice fell suddenly, and she put the question in a
+calm, magisterial tone that sent every eye in the room on a query toward
+the eldest Madigan.
+
+Kate turned at bay. She had slipped off her waist, and the red was
+flushing her long throat and small, spirited face. "Well, miss, suppose
+I am?" she demanded hotly.
+
+"She always changes her dress for dinner, you know," came in a sarcastic
+sneer from Split. "She wants to show our dear cousin how swell we are.
+We all wear low-necked rigs, and father has his swallowtail, and--"
+
+"Shall I bring you the curling-iron, Kathy?" mocked Sissy.
+
+"Don't you want a rose for your hair, Kathleen?"
+
+"Or a ribbon here and there, as Mrs. Ramrod says, Kitty?"
+
+"Aunt Anne says," said Frank, feeling that this was some sort of game
+and that her turn had come, "he's going to mawwy you. Is he, Kate?"
+
+The white cashmere with the red-embroidered rosebuds slipped from Kate's
+hand. All innocent of malicious intent, Frank's shot had scored. The cry
+of the Pack that leaped about her could not touch Kate after this. She
+was frozen in by maidenly prudery, by childish self-consciousness, by
+Madigan perversity. When the bell rang she went in to dinner in her old
+pink gingham, her head high, her lips set, her eyes unseeing.
+
+"She's got 'em," Sissy whispered to Split.
+
+"Yep, that's the sulks all right," Split nodded.
+
+"This is Kate." Miss Madigan, brave in her new purple gown with the lace
+collar at her throat, shot a reproachful glance at the unadorned young
+lady of the house. "Your cousin, Miles Morgan, Kate."
+
+"Howd' ye do?" Kate said coldly, ignoring his outstretched hand and
+passing on to her seat, where she began busily to serve the butter.
+
+The savior of the family looked after her, interested. Though guilty of
+every count in Sissy's indictment, he was not accustomed to being
+overlooked by such very young ladies.
+
+"And this is Irene," said Miss Madigan, a tremor in her voice; she, too,
+knew now that Kate "had 'em." "This one is Cecilia; the twins, Bessie
+and Florence; and Frances, the baby."
+
+The savior of the family glanced along the line of five blank faces, and
+felt the perfunctory touch of five small, slippery hands with nothing
+more human about their clasp than the childish masks above them.
+
+"I say, how do you tell one another apart?" he asked, with a sudden
+gleam in his eye, as they passed him and slid into their places.
+
+A dozen pitying eyes looked coldly at him; half a dozen small mouths
+curved disdainfully. His remark seemed to make them more than ever like
+mechanisms--hostile ones.
+
+Miss Madigan dropped the soup-ladle in her confusion. To that
+experienced lady there was something ominous about so unbroken a union
+of Madigans; she remembered with sorrow the few times any subject had
+found them unanimous.
+
+But Madigan came in just then, took his seat at the head, looked
+mechanically for the banished dog and the cat, and Dusie, chirping
+madly in her cage to attract his attention to the fact of her cruel and
+unusual imprisonment. He cleared his throat and took up the carver--and
+immediately Miles Morgan was conscious of an unbending of the small
+Madigans--a cuddling together, so to speak, and a swift interchange of
+impressions.
+
+"You haven't given me an opportunity to explain, Miss Madigan--" he
+began, in the pause during which Madigan carved strenuously.
+
+"'Aunt Anne,' if you please, my dear boy," urged Miss Madigan, warmly.
+"The relationship's distant, but now that you are with us we can have no
+ceremony out here in the wilds."
+
+"Oh, thank you." The savior, turning toward her, saw the fattest little
+Madigan nudge her red-haired neighbor savagely. She was evidently angry
+at something. "It's good of you to take me in like this. What I want to
+say is that the train was late crawling crookedly up and around the
+mountains. I had no idea of arriving in the evening and coming in upon
+you this way. But when I got here, the town looked so savage, don't you
+know, so--drear--and desolate and--and flimsy, I got a bit
+home-sick--there! The thought of all you people, my own people, housed
+somewhere in the spraddling town, called to me. I positively couldn't
+wait till morning. You'll forgive me--Aunt Anne?"
+
+A suppressed gurgle came from a blonde Madigan on the other side of the
+table, choking over her soup at this endearment. A brunette just her
+height spoke rapidly to her and persuasively, but to no avail. Alarming
+sounds came from the victim till presently a very dignified, small fat
+person rose from her seat, made her way to the nearly suffocated blonde,
+gave her a thump between the shoulder-blades that brought tears of
+another variety to the sufferer's eyes, and walked composedly back to
+her seat.
+
+"How can you be so rough, Sissy!" Aunt Anne exclaimed in an agitated
+voice.
+
+"Ah--Sissy!" The savior leaned forward, looking across with a smile in
+his eye that might have melted any heart save so savage a Madigan's. "So
+you are Sissy."
+
+"My name," said that young person, meeting his smiling eye coldly, "is
+Cecilia."
+
+"But your friends call you Sissy?"
+
+"Yes, my friends do," admitted the perfectionist, with an accent that
+was supposed to be crushing.
+
+"And you sign yourself so in your letters?" he went on pleasantly.
+
+"My letters?"
+
+"Yes; your informal little notes, you know."
+
+Sissy laid down her spoon. A sudden distaste for eating, for living, for
+breathing had come upon her. She had forgotten her postscript to that
+unhappy letter; it was all so long ago, and Aunt Anne's letters never
+had had a sequel! But before her now the savior's head seemed to bob up
+and down sickeningly, while a voice cried in her ears so loud she
+fancied the whole table must hear it:
+
+    "You--whoever you are--needn't bother to answer this.
+    None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's.
+    It's only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and we'll
+    thank you to mind your own business.
+
+                                           _"Sissy Madigan."_
+
+The savior threw back his head in a quite boyish way and laughed aloud
+as he watched her face.
+
+A cold rage seized Sissy. To be laughed at before the whole table! She
+hated him; she knew she hated him!
+
+"I don't understand," said Madigan, feeling called upon to say
+something that was not vituperative at his own dinner-table. "You could
+never have seen a note of Sissy's, Mr. Morgan?"
+
+"Never." The savior lied like a gentleman.
+
+But he was mistaken if he supposed that he had placated Cecilia. She
+would not even meet his eyes, those eyes that twinkled so enjoyingly.
+
+The savior tried Irene.
+
+"You and I have hair the same color," he said genially. "I hope your
+temper isn't like mine, too."
+
+"I hope not," she answered stiffly.
+
+He laughed again, that big, amused laugh. Split's eyes shot fire.
+Evidently the Madigans were funnier than they knew.
+
+"Now, I wonder," he said, "would that be a compliment or a confession?"
+
+"Irene is trying and succeeding better every day in gaining
+self-control," interposed Aunt Anne, with hasty amiability. To discuss
+Irene's temper in committee of the whole, like that--the temerity of the
+man! "Won't you have some more mutton?" she pressed. "It's wash-day, you
+know, and it's just a pick-up dinner; but we're so glad to have you, if
+you'll excuse--"
+
+"The apology's due from me, you know," he interrupted. "And the good
+fortune's mine, too. Fancy me dining the evening of my arrival at that
+brick barn they call the hotel down yonder! It will be hard enough when
+I really have to live there."
+
+"You do not surely expect--" began Madigan, pausing over his
+strawberries.
+
+"To live 'out West'? Will you let me tell you how it happened, Mr.
+Madigan? There isn't much to it--just this: Miles Madigan, as you
+know--do you know?--was not the man to leave much behind him. Not that
+he'd deliberately wrong a fellow, poor old chap, but--well--oh, you
+understand! Well, when his solicitors got through subtracting and
+dividing and subdividing, the heir--one Miles Morgan, bred to do
+nothing, and with a talent for that profession, I must admit--found
+himself poor, with just enough to live on. The ten thousand a year
+had--just slipped through Miles Madigan's fingers."
+
+"Oh!" Miss Madigan's voice was sympathizing, disappointed.
+
+"Then"--it was Frank's clear treble; she hadn't understood much, but she
+knew what "poor" meant: a Madigan learned that early--"then you're not
+going to mawwy Kate?"
+
+Kate went white, while Miss Madigan's delicate face flushed purple, and
+Split pinched Sissy's arm, in her excitement, till that young woman
+cried aloud.
+
+"Frances--outside!" stormed Madigan.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Madigan--please!" deprecated the savior, holding out his arms
+to the whimpering Frances, who jumped into them as to a refuge. "No,
+little girl," he said, bending down to reassure her, "I'm going to marry
+Sissy; that's why I came out here."
+
+A gasp of relief parted Kate's trembling lips. She was very near being
+fond of the detested savior in that moment, in her gratitude to him for
+not having looked at her.
+
+But oh, the disdain of Sissy! It was such a very poor joke, in her
+opinion. Her round little face with its dots for features looked so sour
+and supercilious, as she passed the savior with averted eyes on her way
+out of the dining-room,--the children were withdrawing now,--that he
+could not resist putting out a hand to stop her.
+
+"You will have me, Sissy?" he begged with a laugh. "Think of a man
+coming clear out here with so little encouragement as I had. Such
+devotion might appeal to a heart of stone!"
+
+His enemy stood with downcast eyes, the red slowly mounting to the
+smoothed-back brown hair.
+
+"Sissy's Number One in her class," ventured Frank, as a recommendation.
+
+"I'm not!" flamed forth Sissy. "I never was, or--or if I was it was
+because of--of--"
+
+"Why, Sissy!" interjected Miss Madigan, grieved.
+
+"Of a mistake of some sort," suggested the savior, soothingly. "Well, I
+suppose I could marry a girl that was only Number Two."
+
+"I'm never Number Two--never! I'm Number--Twenty!" Sissy's eyes were
+raised for a moment to his--a revelation of the insulted dignity
+seething within her.
+
+"Oh, well, a Number Twenty wife is good enough; but we'd have to live in
+Ireland, I suppose," said the savior, philosophically.
+
+A passion of wrath at his dullness filled the clever Sissy, and she
+sought for a moment before she found the weapon to hurt him.
+
+"In Ireland, you know," she said, as deliberately as she could for fear
+of breaking into tears before she had delivered the insult, "the pigs
+live in the parlor, and--and the children have no place to sleep and--go
+barefooted!"
+
+"Oh!" The savior was stunned for an instant, but he recovered. "No, I
+didn't know. But in Nevada, I'm told, the Indians eat Irishmen alive,
+and those that are left are shot down by white desperados on C Street
+every day just at noon! We couldn't live here, could we?"
+
+Sissy gasped. She opened her lips as if to speak, but closed them again,
+and suddenly, in the instant's pause, there came an irresistible giggle
+from Split, already out in the hall.
+
+Sissy's hands flew to her breast. She shook off her suitor's detaining
+hand and bolted.
+
+"I couldn't help it," the savior said to Madigan, who was looking at him
+with that perplexed frown which the manifestation of his children's
+eccentricities so often brought to his face. "She is delightful. What
+jolly times we'll have getting acquainted! How fortunate you are, Mr.
+Madigan, to have these--"
+
+Madigan threw up his head, a challenge in his eye. Was he even to be
+congratulated upon his misfortunes?
+
+"I always said," the savior went on, with a chuckle,--"in fact, I began
+to say it before I got into knickerbockers,--that I intended to be the
+father of a family numbering at least a 'baker's dozzen.' I believe I
+had a vague notion that by means of superabundance of paternity I could
+atone to myself for my lack of other family ties. I was always so
+beastly alone. Yet no one--Miles Madigan least of all--saw the pathos of
+my lot. 'He's young and unencumbered,' he said of me toward the last
+when he was reminded of how little he had left for me. 'He'll get along.
+Besides, there's that wildcat mine out in the States; I'm leaving him
+that.'"
+
+Madigan's pipe fell to the floor; he had been filling it for his
+after-dinner smoke. "You've got the Tomboy!" he exclaimed.
+
+"That interests you?" Morgan asked.
+
+Kate, who picked up the pipe and handed it to her father, as she passed,
+the last of the line of young Madigans on the way out, saw how Francis
+Madigan's hand shook. Mechanically she paused and listened.
+
+"I--I was swindled out of my share of that mine," he said harshly.
+"Miles Madigan knew that in fairness half of it was mine. I found it. I
+worked for it. I put aside all other opportunities to devote myself to
+developing it. I sacrificed my children and my business to it. I gave up
+the best years of my life to it. I bore disappointment and poverty
+because of it. I was at the end of my tether when Miles Madigan went
+into it with me; and yet when I saw he was bent on freezing me out of
+it, I--I--But after he got it he didn't know what to do with it. He
+left it to be worked and himself fleeced by strangers. But--it killed my
+wife, and left me, after all those years of litigation, an embittered,
+beggared, broken man!"
+
+"And so it's but fair"--to Kate, shivering at the revelation in her
+father's voice, Miles Morgan's words seemed like soothing music--"it's
+but fair that you and I should handle the thing together--what there is
+of it, Mr. Madigan," he added hastily, as Madigan was about to speak;
+and he leaned forward, holding out his hand boyishly. "There may not be
+much, but I can get English capital to develop it, at a sacrifice of
+half its value now, and its possibilities. So that will leave only
+quarter shares for each of us. I may be offering you only a lot of work
+and a disappointment at the end. But the thing seemed worth enough to
+me, 'way over on the other side, to come out here and look into it
+myself. And one thing that made it seem so was the desperate battle you
+had fought to keep it. I hoped--I hoped you'd like me well enough, when
+we got to know each other, to help me with your experience,
+and--frankly, to help yourself in helping me. I had no intention of
+saying all this to-night, but--allow me, Cousin Kate."
+
+He had dropped Madigan's hand after a hearty squeeze, and was standing
+holding open the door for Kate to pass.
+
+It was a glorified Kate, for, lo, the veil of ill humor had fallen; a
+treacherous Kate, Sissy would have said, for she shone out now, warm and
+sparkling, upon the man who had had the discrimination to let a brood of
+small Madigans pass without special attention, yet who jumped to his
+feet when the young-lady daughter of the house made her exit, and stood
+looking after her till Madigan hauled him off to the library to talk
+about the Tomboy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That certain contentment which followed after an unusually good dinner,
+when the world and the Madigans were young together, had inspired Old
+Mother Gibson. The original couplet, with which all Madigans are
+familiar, is not strictly quotable; it was not invented, but adopted, by
+them. And it served merely to give a name to the game, which was half a
+war-dance, half a cake-walk, accompanied by chanted couplets composed by
+each performer in turn; said couplets being necessarily original and
+relevant locally. The accompaniment--an easy change of chords--was
+played on the piano _colla voce_. And no one minded in the least a
+foot, more or less, at the end of a verse. The joke was the thing with
+the Madigans, and the impromptu rhyme that brought down the house was
+the one that hit hardest.
+
+For Old Mother Gibson was a satire, a pasquinade, a flesh-and-blood
+libel done in rhyme, of wildest license both as to form and matter, and
+set to music--to be discharged full at the head of the victim. It began
+in an orderly way, every Madigan in her turn playing both parts of
+victim and cartoonist. But it degenerated into an open and shameless
+mimicry of Aunt Anne, of Francis Madigan, of the school-master, Mrs.
+Ramrod, the Misses Blind-Staggers, Professor Trask, Dr. Murchison, Wong,
+Indian Jim, and, finally, each of the other's tenderest folly--till a
+living caricature too true or too cutting precipitated an appeal to
+arms, and the Lighthouse, which was always in the way, was tipped over
+in the melee, and had to be thrown out of the window, there to burn
+itself into darkness innocuously.
+
+Old Mother Gibson was given by a full cast the night of the savior's
+arrival. Though Jane Cody had been merciless, Jack, tempted beyond his
+powers of resistance by the sounds of revelry upon the hill, was
+stalking about in melancholy masquerade among its personnel. Bombey
+Forrest, her delicate head looking like a surprised sunflower upon its
+masculine stalk, had come in, and Crosby Pemberton, looking as much out
+of place in his immaculate linen and small Tuxedo as either of these,
+was joyous at being among Madigans again.
+
+You might have heard--if you'd stood out on the piazza looking in, and
+happened to have the key to the riddle--a hint in verse of every Madigan
+escapade, of every Madigan failing, of all the Madigan jokes, on Old
+Mother Gibson nights. You would have seen even Kate--young-lady Kate,
+who had once substituted in a school--join in this mad revel, with an
+appetite for fun that showed how much of a child she still was.
+
+An impressionable young Irishman, who had come out upon the piazza to
+smoke a cigar and think himself back into his usual poise after a day
+full of new experiences, had his attention attracted by the strumming on
+the piano; and glancing in through the open window, he saw a slender,
+graceful girl, her dark head rising lightly from the sailor collar of a
+pink gingham blouse. She was balancing lightly as she walked, keeping
+time to the rhythm, and followed by a procession of children in single
+file. (A belief in the efficacy of motion to stimulate one's power of
+improvisation made Old Mother Gibson the liveliest of games.) And
+arriving at the center of the stage, she delivered herself in a singsong
+of the following:
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson, be on your best behavior,
+    Or you'll surely fail to satisfy the savior."
+
+It didn't seem a very funny or apposite ditty to Miles Morgan, but, to
+judge by its effect upon those within, it was exquisitely witty. The
+whole company doubled up with laughter. It giggled till its collective
+sides must have ached; then it slowly and gaspingly subsided. When it
+had quieted down, the piano began again, and a red-headed Madigan,
+intoxicated by the music, the license of the time, and the excitement
+accompanying creative work, danced a fantastic _pas seul_, as she flew
+about in the Mother Gibson merry-go-round.
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson's savior was a dandy--
+    He thought he'd buy the Madigans with a stick of candy!"
+
+sang Split, and the parlor yelled itself hoarse with uproarious delight.
+
+The fat little girl at the piano began to play, and stopped several
+times, that she might wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and get
+her breath. At last, with a squaring of her shoulders and a stiffening
+of backbone that seemed queerly familiar to Morgan, watching outside,
+she half drawled, half sang, with an unmistakable accent:
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson was angry at the Fates;
+    My word! They sent the savior 'way out to the States!"
+
+A sudden enlightenment came to Miles Morgan. For a moment the red flamed
+up in his cheek, and if Split could have seen his face she might have
+fancied that some imp had caught her likeness, when her temper had got
+beyond her control, and set it on this man's body.
+
+"The impudent little beggars!" Morgan cried furiously. "My word!" He
+stopped, remembering the use to which his favorite exclamation had been
+put. "But what a saucy lot!" He was laughing before he had finished
+wording his thought.
+
+He was interested now, and listened with a grin to Fom's declaration
+that
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson ought to 've known better
+    Then to come in answer to Aunt Anne's letter."
+
+He saw even Frank strutting in the ring, though she was capable only of
+a repetition of the classic phrase with which each couplet began. And he
+laughed with the rest at Bep,--poor, unready Bep, set as by a musical
+time-lock and bound to go off,--getting slower and slower in motion as
+well as utterance, the accompaniment retarding sympathetically as the
+critical moment approached when she must be delivered of her rhyme.
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson, why do you--"
+
+she began her singsong. "No, no! Wait. I know another. 'T ain't fair,"
+she stammered in a prose parenthesis.
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson had a--
+
+"Stop laughing, now; wait a minute. You don't give me a chance, Sissy.
+You play faster for me than for anybody else! You do it a-purpose, too,
+just 'cause you know it's easy to bluster me.
+
+    "Old Moth-er--Gib-son--"
+
+Bep stopped suddenly, for through the glass doors came the subject of
+her lay. He had a finger to his lips as he glanced at Sissy's back--a
+hint that the rest of the company seized delightedly. And when the music
+began again, he was not ashamed to make this contribution:
+
+    "Old Mother Gibson, take pity on a cousin
+    Left to the tender mercies of the other half-dozen!"
+
+At first the accompanist, accustomed to the rodomontade of voice as well
+as gesture of the excited performers, was not aware of the interloper.
+When she finally spun around and saw the savior singing in the midst of
+his libelers, she let him finish the couplet unaccompanied, and sat, a
+fat, shocked statue glued to the piano-stool, staring at him.
+
+It was absurd of him, but there was something in Old Mother Gibson, as
+the Madigans sang and played her, that turned the soberest of heads. And
+the savior's forte was not in being staid. He fell upon his knee before
+her.
+
+"Forgive me, O Sissy, for not being a Madigan," he begged, "and receive
+me into the fold!"
+
+She looked down at him, self-conscious, embarrassed; yet the hidden
+sentimentality of her nature was appealed to by the masculine young face
+turned half laughing, half seriously, to her.
+
+"Are you sure," she asked shyly, "that you're not one already?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is of record that one evening during that summer when the old Tomboy
+mine was reopened, a young Irishman newly arrived on the Comstock
+escorted down to Fitzmeier's--where, everybody knows, there is ice-cream
+to be had--six girls of assorted ages, one boy, and two young persons
+whose garments belied their sex. Yet they all seemed rampantly happy and
+quite unashamed.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Madigans, by Miriam Michelson
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