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 régime 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 protégée (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 cañon--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 cañon 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 cañon, 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.