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.



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.



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.



"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.



"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!"