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.