"And fa-ther tooked Bep," remarked Frank the next day, the light of desire fulfilled in her eye, "and he said 'You ox!' and smacked her wif two fingers!"

* * * * *

Miss Madigan, who was a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in turn—only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to an expressing age.

It occurred to her once to satisfy her maternal cravings—so perversely left ungratified amid much material that lacked mothering—with an imported angel-child. She chose Bombey Forrest's three-year-old brother for the purpose; a small manikin manufactured according to recipe by his mother, whom he had been taught to call "Dear-rust" in imitation of his pernicious progenitor; whose curls were as long, whose trousers were as short, whose collars were as big, whose sashes were as flaunting as feminine folly could make them.

The Madigans hailed his advent with delight the night he was loaned to their aunt, in their mistaken glee fancying his visit was to themselves. Miss Madigan soon undeceived them. At table he sat next to that devoted lady, who heaped the choicest bits upon his plate of a menu which had been ordered solely with regard to infantile tastes. Afterward this maiden lady (whose genius for mothering cruel fate had condemned to waste its sweetness upon half a dozen mere Madigans) built card houses for her borrowed baby, read him the nursery rhymes that Sissy used to tell to Frances, confiscated Fom's Dora for his pleasure, and Split's book of interiors made of illustrated advertisements of furniture, which she had cut out and arranged tastefully upon a tissue-paper background. She dangled her old-fashioned enameled watch before his jaded eyes, and even permitted him to hold Dusie, the canary, who pecked furiously at the presuming hand that detained her.

At this the borrowed baby set up a howl of alarm, whereupon he was given Sissy's jackstones—not altogether to that young lady's sorrow, for at that moment Split was collecting a cruel pinch or bestowing a stinging slap for every point in the game she had just won.

To the bathing of the child Miss Madigan gave her personal attention, while Kate waited for the tub, into which it was her nightly task to coax Frances. Then, when her charge was ready for bed, the devoted aunt of other children sat rocking the borrowed baby softly till he fell asleep. The whole household hushed that night when Baby Fauntleroy Forrest's eyelids fell. An indignant lot of young Madigans were hustled off to bed that his slumbers might not be disturbed; and yet the moment Miss Madigan laid him, with infinite care and a sentimental smile, in her own bed, his eyes flew open, like the disordered orbs of a wax doll that has forgotten it was made to open its eyes when in a vertical position and keep them shut when placed horizontally. He saw a strange face bending over him, and he howled with terror.

Miss Madigan tried to comfort him, babbling fondest baby-talk in vain.

"I yant to go home!" wailed Aunt Anne's Fauntleroy.

Why, no; he didn't want to go home, the lady to whom he had been loaned assured him. Mama was asleep and daddy was asleep and Bombey was asleep and the pussy was—

"I yant to go home!" bellowed the borrowed baby.

But how could he go home? the lady, a bit impatiently, demanded. Wasn't he all undressed? Did he want to go through the streets all undressed—fie, fie, for shame!

"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy Forrest.

"Sissy—Irene—some one come here and amuse this child!" called Aunt Anne, at her wits' end. Fauntleroy was black in the face from holding his breath, and his borrower was nervously exhausted by the tension of a day spent in attendance upon the lovely child.

A troop of nightgowned Madigans came joyously in. For the edification of Fauntleroy, sitting up wide-eyed now in Aunt Anne's big bed, the tears still on his cheeks, the Madigans made monkeys of themselves till he dropped off asleep at last, when they were dismissed by a frazzled maiden lady, who was left looking at the small thing lying in her bed as at some strange animal whose waking she dreaded.

In the middle of the night and again toward morning the Madigans heard Fauntleroy's frightened scream, and chuckled like the depraved young things they were. But when Francis Madigan got up and, candle in hand, his queer nightcap tumbling over his left eye, and his gaunt shadow covering the wall and wavering over the ceiling, came to demand of Miss Madigan what in thousand devils was the matter, the borrowed baby was thrown into convulsions; while Don, the big Newfoundland, awakened by the din, burst into hoarse barks that the mountains echoed and reechoed. After this it seemed best to Aunt Anne to sit up in bed for the rest of the night, making shadow-pictures on the wall for Fauntleroy.

Miss Madigan's high color had faded the next morning. Accustomed to unbroken sleep, she had not rested half an hour the whole night. It seemed that Fauntleroy Forrest was in the habit of lying across his bed instead of along it, and he had so terrorized the poor lady that she had not dared to move him, when he did fall asleep toward morning and she felt his toes digging into her ribs, lest he wake.

"Hurry with your breakfast, Sissy," she said faintly, sipping her tea, "so that you can take him home before school."

"Don't yant to go home!" whimpered the baby, whom the morning light and the presence of many small Madigans had reassured.

"He could stay and play with Frank, couldn't he, Aunt Anne?" suggested Sissy, sweetly.

Miss Madigan's look spoke volumes.

"Yes, yes," cried Fauntleroy. "Don't yant to go home!"

His papa would be lonesome, Miss Madigan told him, archly; and his mama would be lonesome, and Bombey—

"Don't yant to go home!" wept the baby.

"There! There!... Take him, Frank, into my room and amuse him—anything, only don't let him cry!" exclaimed Miss Madigan. "I'm going into Kate's room to lie down. I'm exhausted and—"

"Did Fauntleroy disturb you, Aunt Anne?" asked Kate, sympathetically.

But Miss Madigan hurried away. She was so unnerved she feared that she might weep. But, after nearly half an hour's trying, she found she was too tired to sleep, after all, and rising wearily, she went back to her room for the book she had been reading.

The sight that met her eyes, as she opened the door, completed her undoing. There was Fauntleroy, with an uncomprehending grin on his cherubic face, pinching each separate leaf of her cherished sensitive-plant. Evidently the borrowed baby did not exactly understand the desperately funny quality of the act, but he knew it must be the funniest thing in the world, for the Madigans were writhing grotesquely in the unbounded merriment it caused.

With a cry, Miss Madigan flew forward and sharply slapped the destructive baby hands.

"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy.

"Yes; and I want you to go, too," Miss Madigan declared, incensed. "Get his things, Sissy, this minute."

"But I want him to play wif," whimpered Frank. She was not so slow but that she could learn the lesson Fauntleroy's success taught.

Miss Madigan looked at her a moment. "Oh, you do!" she ejaculated sarcastically. "You haven't sisters enough—you want more noise and confusion in this house!"

The wise Madigans looked from her to one another and merely thought things. There was sadly little of the "angel child" about them. Their intuition was keen enough to penetrate their aunt's secret wishes and tastes, and they were occasionally tempted, for the spoils to be gotten out of it, to play up to that lady's ideals. But Aunt Anne was considered almost too easy by the Madigans, whom honor restricted to those foemen worthy of their steel. Frances was the only one who could, without losing caste, cater to her aunt's well-known and deeply detested sentimentality.

She did for a time, and it was from Miss Madigan that she learned her famous accomplishment. It was sung, or rather droned, and it went like this:

"B—A—Ba, B—E—Be, B—I—Bi— Ba—Be—Bi; B—O—Bo, Ba—Be—Bi—Bo, B—U—Bu, Ba—Be—Bi—Bo—Bu!"

Intoxicated by success, Frank sang this subtle ditty one day for Francis Madigan. He listened to it with that puzzled expression which his children's vagaries brought to his lined, stern face.

"Who taught you that nonsense, Frances?" he demanded sternly when she had finished.

Frank began to whimper. This was not the effect she had intended to produce.

"Who told you to say that gibberish?" her father repeated angrily.

Frank stammered the answer.

"And he tooked her—" she began her account of the incident afterward.

"Oh, you awful little liar!" interrupted a chorus of Madigans.

And Frank laughed with them. How she would have completed the sentence, if she had been permitted, she herself did not know.



A READY LETTER-WRITER

Split threw herself with a bump against Miss Madigan's door. It remained unansweringly closed.

"Where's Aunt Anne?" she asked Sissy, whom she had nearly walked over as she sat playing jackstones in the hall.

Sissy looked up. Assuming a rigidly erect position and scholastically correct finger-movement, she mimicked her aunt at her desk so faithfully that Split could almost see the close-lined pages of Miss Madigan's ornate handwriting on the carpet where her disrespectful niece pretended to trace it.

"Scribbling, huh?" Split asked.

Sissy nodded.

Split shrugged her shoulders impatiently. She had intended to ask a favor of Aunt Anne, but she knew how useless it would be now. So she pushed past Sissy, entered the room softly, and returned with a long-trained grenadine skirt.

Sissy's round eyes opened enviously. "Did she say you could have it?" she asked.

A muffled sound which could be variously interpreted came from Split, who was throwing the skirt over her head.

"Did she?" persisted Sissy, putting her jackstones in her pocket and rising emulatively.

But Irene was doubling fold after fold of the skirt in front to shorten it; behind her the train billowed with an elegance that sent ecstatic thrills through her and a passion of envy through her sister.

"Is she writing yet?" Sissy asked at length.

Irene nodded. She was cinching her sash tight about the waist, so that her trained skirt might not come off in the ardor of "playing lady." When Sissy disappeared, and reappeared with her aunt's claret-colored poplin, Split was catching up her train with a grace that was simply ravishing as she rustled away.

"What'll you say to her—afterward?" called Sissy after her, prudently facing the future, even in the height of delight induced by feeling ruffles about her feet.



"Pouf!" A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herself to be very French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her. She never knows what she says when she's writing."

Sissy nodded understandingly, and rustled in a most ladylike manner after her senior. The twins saw the two beautiful creatures swishing down the front steps, bound for the street to show their glory and feel the peacock's delight in dragging his tail in the dust.

"Did she say you could have 'em?" they shrieked.

And Sissy responded with that quick imitative gesture that signified scribbling.

With a light on their faces such as the Goths might have worn when pillaging Rome, the twins made for the treasure-house. A few moments later they rustled gorgeously down the steps, followed by Frances, wearing her aunt's embroidered red flannel petticoat. Unfortunately, Frank's heels caught in this, as she too strutted worldward, and down she fell, bumping from step to step, gaining momentum as she bumped, and threatening to roll clear down to Taylor Street, and so on down, down into the canon, if she had not bumped safely at last into the twins. They, hearing her coming, had turned their backs and joined hands, and catching hold of the shaky banister on each side, presented a natural bulwark beyond which Frances and her bumps and shrieks might not pass.

And through it all Miss Madigan wrote.

* * * * *

Miss Madigan was writing letters. Indeed, Miss Madigan was always writing letters. In any emergency she might be trusted to concoct a long and literary epistle, which she rephrased, edited, and copied till she felt all an author's satisfaction.

For the Madigans' Aunt Anne was afflicted with cacoethes scribendi, and was never so happy as when there was a letter to be written—except when she was actually writing it. But the heartlessness of the merely literary was very far indeed from Miss Madigan's ideal. She had the happiness to believe that, besides being very beautiful, her letters were most useful—in fact, indispensable. When everything else failed she wrote a letter. When that failed she wrote another.

A Malthusian consequence of her epistolary fertility, it might be feared, would be the necessary exhaustion of correspondents. But Miss Madigan's was a soul above the inevitable, as well as a pen divorced from the practical. On those occasions when the future of her nieces pressed itself questioningly upon that lady's mind she met the threat by declaring firmly to herself that she would "do her duty to those motherless children." It happened that her duty was her pleasure. It was her dissipation to suffer—on paper. In letters she enjoyed being miserable. No relative, therefore, however distant, no acquaintance, however slight, was exempt from this epistolary plague. To take the darkest view, most genteelly expressed; to make the most forthright and pitiful appeal in a ladylike and polished phrase; to picture the inevitable and speedy alternative if her plea were disregarded; and then to sign herself, "With a thousand apologies, and the assurance that only the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's children would bring me to trouble you again,"—this was Miss Madigan's vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously good can be.

A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened, produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her own summing up of the situation that she felt there could not be the smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do—write to him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific family, its members widely scattered and differentiated—an ideal clientele for a ready letter-writer.

So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated, yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.

But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.

"Anne, I say!"

Miss Madigan's busy pen paused. It seemed to her that there was unusual irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had knocked before, or was there—

The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was writing.



"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it may be a change for you to read letters. Read that!" He threw the page on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of fury.

She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:

Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more resist it than Miles could the bottle.

"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.

"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."

He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of which, to do the poor lady justice, was intended directly for her own habitation.

She took the letter and spread it out carefully before her; these epistolary children of hers were tenderly dear to Miss Madigan. Her eye caught a phrase here and there that appeared to be singularly felicitous. This one, for instance:

Poor Francis, of course, knows nothing about this letter. I am writing to you, my dear cousin, relying as much upon your discretion as upon your generosity.

Or this one:

And Cecilia—she is really talented, though a commonplace creature like myself can hardly give you an idea in just what direction.

Or this one:

As to Irene, apart from her voice, which is really exceptional, she is Francis over again—Francis as he was, a high-spirited, reckless, devil-may-care fellow, winning and tyrannical, as we all remember him in the old days when the world was young.

Or even this:

I am afraid Kate will have to teach school, young as she is. I can't tell you how I dread the long years of drudgery I see before this slender, spirited child—she is little more than that. Think, Miles, of these motherless children growing up in this wretched hole without the smallest advantage, and, if you can, help them; or get some one else to. Couldn't you take Kate into your own family? I'm sure she'd marry well, and Nora wouldn't be troubled with her long. She's really very pretty. Or couldn't you send me a little something to spend on clothes for her? Or couldn't Nora be persuaded to send her—

"Well," thundered Madigan, standing over her, "it must be pretty familiar to you. Suppose you read what Nora says."

Miss Madigan put her own letter away with a sigh. It was really unaccountable that Miles could have resisted it.

"Miles passed away six weeks ago,"

she read aloud in an awed voice.

"He had been ailing all spring. This letter, which came a fortnight since, I opened, of course, and return it to you that you may be made aware (if you are not already) of the demands Anne makes upon comparative strangers.

"For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your children, all girls; but that can't be true—she always loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her writing is so illegible that—"

Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.

"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.

"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said? Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because I don't dare to beg in my own name."

"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked. "Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.

"'Where'! Thousand devils—'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.

Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into such a rage.

A silence followed.

"Look here, Anne,"—Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be calm,—"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt my—"

"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, "why I should not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces' sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities have—"

"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"

"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see, my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning—"

With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.

Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's letter:

As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan. Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little matter of her never having seen him would not, of course, stand in her way.

"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.

She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not—

Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.

* * * * *

The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them. In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.

They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right sex, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk unrecognized in the rear.



In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cut her adorer dead, dead, dead, and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and tyrannical) over the other sex.

"Let's try to see the walking-match," she suggested to Split.

"How can we, with all that tagging after us?"

With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had never before been out on a raid.

"Let 'em tag," cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no obstacles.

Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing. Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling, dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female projectile.

Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way of flourish to mark the conclusion of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught her, with a whoop of satisfaction.

His whoop was cut short abruptly, and he set her down, his ears tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the short time given to her.

Cody looked at her. It was really the first time he had regarded her as an unrelated individual. "Ye know what a boy does when a girl strikes him," he threatened, a laughing glitter in his bold black eye that made Sissy's heart jump.

But she held herself very primly, and the masking puritan in her voice quelled him. "If he's a coward—yes," she responded haughtily, hurrying on.

The boy looked after her as he joined Split. "She's funny—your sister," he said lamely.

"Who—Sissy? Oh, she's always cranky," said Irene, with Madigan candor when a relative was criticized.

They hurried on. The barn-like opera-house is built uphill, like all buildings on Virginia City's cross-streets, and it seems to burrow into as well as climb the hill. In the rear, on the side where its boards were unpainted and unplaned, certain knots had been converted into knot-holes by the initiated.

Sissy was already on her knees, her eye glued to one of these apertures. All she could see was a short curve of empty seats, a man's shoulder and another's hat, a long space, and then the passing of a neat, long pair of women's gaiters unhidden by skirts, and soon after the nervous following of a smaller pair of women's ties.

"Why," she said, with a deep blush, fixing one eye upon the company, while the other blinked from the strain put upon it, "they're women! It's a women's walking-match."

"Sure," said Cody, without withdrawing his attention for a moment from the view inside. "The big, long feet belong to the one they call La Tourtillotte. She's French. The German one's Von Hagen."

"I think it's a shame," gasped Sissy. "Let's go home, Split."

Split, at her own particular knot-hole, affected not to hear. But Crosby Pemberton, perched in the elbow of some long scantlings bracing the building, took heart at Sissy's words.

"It isn't respectable, Sissy," he called to her. "No ladies go. Your aunt wouldn't like it."

This was fatal. At his voice Sissy hardened, and with a gulp of disgust she resolutely turned her attention to her knot-hole. In fact, as Crosby reiterated his advice, she felt called upon more spectacularly to ignore it, and seeing a more commanding and spacious knot-hole farther up, she mounted upon a big dry-goods box, and from there seated herself in a lone poplar, the apple of the proprietor's eye.

This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more slowly around the circular track.

Despite her shocked sense of propriety,—and the lawless young Madigans had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,—the ardor of the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. She heard a swift call from Irene, some distance below, and was vaguely aware that the company, skirted and otherwise, was beating a retreat. But the smaller of the two contestants, on the other side of the knot-hole, had just come within the field of Sissy's rude lens. It was pitiable to see the haggard look on the German woman's plump face, the childish breakdown imminent behind the woman's staring eyes that met the bored glance of the male spectators doggedly, though her stout little body was still being carried resolutely, sluggishly, painfully along.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for his own sins and every other man's.

"Quick—quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt.

"Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet.

"Jan Lally—oh, hurry!"

Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying.

Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the course of their maraudings, the Madigans were not unaccustomed to a stern-chase and a lively one, yet now it seemed to her that strategy was the watchword. Perched high up in the tree, hidden by its foliage, who would notice her—if only Crosby would go away!

But Crosby would not budge. He begged, he implored, he became confused in trying to explain to her her danger, and at last burst into bitter tears as he felt Lally's fat, moist hand upon his collar, and saw a hereafter peopled with wrathful motherly faces in various stages of disgust and despair.

"You come vid me. I gif you to Riddle. He lock you oop, you bat boy!"

A suppressed giggle of pleasure, at the thought of neat little Crosby in the hands of the constable, shook Sissy, perched snugly like a malicious little bird in the tree. It served him right, she said to herself gleefully, ascribing the basest motives to Crosby, as one loves to do when one's friends are not in good standing with one's self. He had had no business to hang around and point the way to her hiding-place!

"Oh, I say, Jan, let me off!" begged Crosby, white with terror of the jail—and his lady mother. "I'll never peek again, sure I won't!"

"Nu! You come vid me. And you, too!"

Sissy looked down. Was it possible there was another laggard whom she had not seen?

"I say—you, too!" bellowed Lally. "Vill you come now?"

In the very certainty of security a sudden panic fell upon Sissy. If she only dared to move, to reassure herself! Of course it couldn't mean herself—oh!

She felt a sudden tug that almost dislodged her. "You t'ink I don't see—huh?" shouted the perspiring Teuton below. "What for you leave dis trail hang down den—hey?" And he tugged again.

With a sickly remnant of dignity Sissy stepped down and out. She had forgotten her train—the train that had been at once her pride and her undoing.

"We—I was playing lady," she explained, trembling.

"Oop a tree—huh? Peeking t'rough knot-holes—yes? A fine lady! I fix you."

A glow of defiance came to Sissy's cheeks. "I don't care," she cried, stamping her foot as she stood enthroned on the dry-goods box, her train about her. "It's a nasty, cruel show, anyway, and you couldn't hire me to come and see it. You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lally! How'd you like it if your wife was staggering along in there without sleeping or eating for six days?"

Mr. Jan Lally's purple face looked as though it had been slapped. What had Mrs. Lally, with all her babies and busy housekeeping, to do with business? He was so astonished and perplexed by the sudden onslaught that the wriggling Crosby managed to slip out of his grasp, and got to a safe distance before Lally realized it.

"Nu!" he grunted. "I cou'n't hire you—no? Vell, you come mitout hire. I show you."

Sissy felt herself lifted down without ceremony and dragged off. Her round face was white, her heart was beating like the stamps at the Chollar pan-mill. Yet her train trailed after her still in mock dignity. So did Crosby, at a respectful distance, fearing to follow, yet, though helpless, incapable of desertion. But at the entrance to the opera-house the door was shut in his face.

Sissy and her captor entered. The stage had been built out over the pit, and in the very first row of the dress-circle, the rim of which was the boundary of the contestants' suffering feet, Jan Lally sat down, with Sissy at his side.

Ah, to sit in the front row of the dress-circle! To feel the opulence of one's enviable position, as well as the artistic delight of being properly placed where one could miss nothing, while the brass band outside the opera-house played its third and last quick, jubilant invitation to pleasure—so tantalizing to the outsider, so gratifying to the fortunate one within!

Many and many a time had Sissy Madigan waited, during first and second bands, for some miracle to set her where she now sat! Many a time had the third selection been played, the players with their instruments filed into Paradise, and the poor Madigan peri remained shut outside.

But now Cecilia hung her head, shamed by being caught; shamed by punishment; shamed trebly by the fact that, apart from those poor sexless, half-maddened machines tottering feverishly around and forever around, she, Sissy Madigan, the proud, the pure, the proper, was the one thing womanly in the house!

It was not a full house by any means, and only the men immediately next to her seemed aware of her presence. Yet, with a consciousness that seared her soul and humbled the pride of the childish prude as with a stain upon her purity, Sissy felt the compounded, composite gaze of man upon woman out of place. It withered, it scorched, it stung her.

But finally Von Hagen, the little German woman, going the round of her maddening treadmill, reached the spot where Sissy sat. The sight of a child there, of a bare, bowed, neat little head in the midst of that inclosure of men's cold eyes, seemed to be the last touch needed to overthrow her tottering reason. She stopped, swaying from the unaccustomed cessation of motion, and held out her arms, smiling vacantly and babbling baby-talk in German as though to a dearly loved little Maedchen of her own.

Swift horror piled on Sissy. She had never looked into eyes from which sense had fled, and the sight stamped itself upon her brain with terrible vividness as food for future nightmares. So frightened was she that she was not aware of Jan Lally's relaxed hold upon her arm, which ached from the tight grip he had had upon it. But when the overtaxed body of the German woman fell in a heap almost at her feet, fright became action in Sissy. She flew past old Jan (his one concern now being for his walking-match), past the knees of the staring men, up the interminable center aisle, her poor train switching behind her as she stumbled, yet ran on, so absorbed by her suffering that she was unaware of the attention her queer little figure attracted, till she was out at last in the free air.

* * * * *

"Well, punish me!" she said, when she found Aunt Anne waiting for her at the head of the long steps fifteen minutes later.

It was a good deal for a Madigan—the nearest they ever got to mea culpa: they were not Christians.

* * * * *

Sissy's arrival was hailed by a populous nightgowned world, sent, like herself, supperless for its sins to the purgatory of early bedtime. Split came stealing in from the other room, bringing Frank along that she might not cry and betray her elder sister's movements—a successful sort of blackmail the youngest Madigan often practised. And later, Kate, looking most conventional and full-dressed in this nightgowned society, brought succor for the starving. They munched chocolate and camped comfortably, three on each bed, while Sissy told her adventures. When she came to the description of Von Hagen's fall, though still shuddering at the memory, she acted the incident so dramatically that Frances set up a howl, which was, however, most fortunately drowned by the ringing of the front-door bell.

Split started to answer it, but her nightgowned state gave her pause. "Perhaps father'll go," she suggested.

Kate shook her head. "He didn't come to dinner; he's been shut up in his room all day."

"What's the matter?" asked Sissy. An old look, that washed all the self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.

Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a martyr.

Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate anything that was prepared for the family dinner, she could remember the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young lives flowed full and free.

But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.

Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall, old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City, Nevada, California, U. S. A."

"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.

"Well,—" Kate had been thinking,—"I'm Miss Madigan."

"Whoop—hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed it obligingly into Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.

"Girls—it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in the quantity of material before her.

"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin, she began to put them on.

"And ladies' clothes!" cried Sissy, dragging forth a long black cape. "'Here would I rest,'" she chanted, draping it about her and lugubriously mimicking Professor Trask as the Recluse in "The Cantata of the Flowers."

"Let's do it! Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself into some Irish boy's jacket.

"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical compulsion had been threatened.

"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and—"

"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She had a much-feathered hat on her head and a crocheted lace shawl about her shoulders.



"I'll be the Rose." Split, corrupted by her body's boyish environment, stretched her legs apart defiantly. "You can't sing it; you know you can't, Kate. You never could get up to G. If I'm not the Rose—"

"Oh, well," said Kate, drawing on a pair of soiled, long light gloves she had pulled out of the box, "I'll be the Lily, then. Come on, Sis."

"I won't," said Sissy, almost weeping. She knew she would. "I won't be the Recluse! I won't be the Recluse every time, just because you two are so greedy and—"

"You know," said Kate, smothering a giggle, but not very successfully, "no one can do it as well as you."

"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo," chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?"

"If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing, anyway."

"Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her eye made her junior dance.

"You know I can't," she sniffled.

"But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily duet," said Kate, putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack and opening it persuasively.

"You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time."

"Well, you won't next time," said Kate, generously. "Will she, Split?"

"Well, I won't sing it this time," declared Sissy, seating herself at the piano, yet making a last stand at the very guns.

But Kate and Irene burst forth in the opening chorus with all the verve in the world. The Madigans never scorned expression when it was understood that they were acting. And the twins, still pulling stage properties out of the box, and even Frances, fantastically decorated with a torn Irish lace fichu over the bifurcated, footed white garment she still wore o' nights, joined joyfully in:

"'We are the flowers, The fair young flowers, That come at the voice of spring—' DING—DONG!"

It was a familiar old Madigan joke, always greeted with a shriek of laughter, to shout out the two notes of the accompaniment that punctuated the musical phrases. Its observance now put even Sissy in good humor, so that when the time came for the Recluse to make his appearance, she left the piano, and stalking miserably about with the preliminary cough with which the unfortunate Professor Trask was afflicted, she sang her doleful recitative.

The Madigans were never literalists. They were of the impressionistic school, which requires of the audience, as well as of the artist, high imaginative powers. And here the audience of one moment was the actor of the next, whose duty it was not to mind too closely the letter that killeth, but to mimic irreverently, to exaggerate, to make of themselves caricatures of the mannerisms of others, to nickname, to seize upon every peculiarity with their quick, observant, cruel young eyes and paint it in flesh-and-blood cartoons.

Thus, when the Rose, that "gentle flower in which a thorn is oft concealed," sang her duet with the Nightingale (Sissy trilling weakly on the piano, while Frank fluted her fingers affectedly as she had seen it done that memorable night) it was done in the hollow, throaty tones of the elder Miss Blind-Staggers, who had created the role; while the Lily sang through her nose, which she wiped every now and then in a manner unmistakably that of Henrietta Blind-Staggers.

"The Cantata of the Flowers" was never brought to a glorious completion by the Madigans, even though they skipped uninteresting and difficult parts, and, like the early Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's incurable tendency to sing off key. But that night it might have dragged its saccharine length of melody to the coronation of the Rose and a quick curtain if Miss Madigan had not walked right into the thick of it.

"Golly!" gasped Sissy, while Irene dodged behind Kate, who quickly turned down the lamp, and a hush fell upon the rest.

But Miss Madigan had been writing, or rather rewriting, letters. She had completely forgotten the heinous offense of the afternoon.

"Will you mail a letter for me, Sissy, the first thing in the morning?" she asked, still preoccupied. "Why are you in the dark?"

"We're just going to bed," remarked Sissy, with soothing demureness, taking the envelope from her aunt's hand and falling in with her mood, as one does with the mentally afflicted.

When Miss Madigan, fatigued with the labor of composition, had gone back to her room, Kate turned up the light again. "Same thing, I s'pose?" she asked. "Circumstances-letter—huh?"

"I s'pose so. 'T ain't sealed," said Sissy, with resignation. "But she always forgets to seal 'em." Then, suddenly inspired, she caught up Professor Trask's pencil lying on the piano, and on the vacant half-page at the end of Miss Madigan's letter she wrote in her best school-girl hand:

You—whoever you are—needn't bother to answer this. None of us Madigans wants your help or annybody else's. It 't only that Aunt Anne's got the scribbles, and we'll thank you to mind your own buisness.

Sissy Madigan.

She read her composition to the startled but, on the whole, approving Madigans, sealed the letter, and was ready for bed.

They were all scampering through the long hall playing leap-frog—a specialty of Split's which her present costume facilitated—when Francis Madigan, candle in hand, came out of his room on his usual tour of nightly inspection. His short-sighted eyes fell upon Irene, a pretty, lithe, wavy-haired boy, before she and the twins bolted.

"What boy have you got there?" he demanded. "Send him home."

Kate took Frances up in her arms and covered the retreat; she knew how much the better part of valor was discretion.

Sissy remained standing, looking up at him. When she was alone with her father she was conscious of her poor little barren favoriteship, though she dared not impose upon it. In the candle-light his harsh, rugged features stood out marked with lines of suffering.

"It's all right, father," she said, with a quick choice of the lesser irritation for him. "He'll go—right away. Good night."

"Good night, child."

But she walked a step or two with him, slipping her hand at last into his, and pressing it tenderly.

"Is—anything the matter, father?" she whispered.



He threw back his head as though some one had struck him. It was not difficult to guess from whom the Madigans had inherited their fanatical desire to conceal emotion.

Sissy was terrified at what she had done, yet the vague trouble lay quivering before her, though still unnamed, in his working face.

"Father—I'm sorry," she sobbed.

He pushed her from him, but gently, and she crept into her bed and pulled the clothes over her head, that the twins might not hear her strangled sobbing.



"THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN"

With a shrill whistle of recognition, Jack Cody ran down the hill to meet Split toiling up.

The air is like ethereal champagne in Virginia City, and on a late summer's evening, after the sun's honeyed freshness has been strained through miles of it, it has a quality that makes playing outdoors intoxicating.

Split, though, had not been playing. There was business on hand and she had been downtown to buy eggs for the picnic, with the usual result. She had never yet succeeded in bringing home an unbroken dozen, nor did she ever hope to; but she was really out of temper at the extraordinary dampness of the paper bag, to which her two hands adhered stickily. She walked slowly upward, holding the eggs far in front of her like a votive offering to the culinary gods, unconscious of the betraying yellow streaks that beaded her blue gingham apron.

"Where you been, Split?" asked Cody, by way of an easy opening.

"Down to the grocery. Mrs. Pemberton's not laying decently these days."

"Mrs. Pemberton!"

"Sissy's gray hen, you know. Sissy called her that 'cause she's so stuck-up and thinks she's better than any other hen in the yard. Besides, she's got only one chicken, and bosses him for all the world like Crosby."

Cody nodded. "What time you going to start in the morning? Six?"

"Uh-huh." Split dared not lift her eyes from the sticky trail that exuded from her.

"Sure?" the boy demanded.

"Sure—if only father don't keep us so long to-night that we can't get ready. We've got to be martyred to-night," she added gloomily.

Cody looked his resentment and sympathy. Delicacy and the fear of betraying some social disability on his own part of which he was unaware—some neglect of training which might be considered essential in well-regulated families—forbade his inquiring precisely what the process was. To him "martyring" meant some queer rite whose main and malicious purpose it was to keep Split indoors of an evening when the high mountain twilight was going to be long, long; and when the moon that followed it would be so brilliant that one might read by its light—if he weren't too wise, and too fond of hide-and-seek—out in the silver-flooded streets made vocal by childish cries.

"But it can't last the whole evening?" he asked appealingly, as she prepared to mount the steps, always accompanied by the silent yellow witness of her passing.

She shook her head hopelessly, sniffing in a manner that showed plainly how little reliance she placed upon the generosity and judgment of adults. And Cody walked away, haunted by the tormenting vision of Split flying before him through the moonlit night: the only girl in town who had any originality about choosing hiding-places, or who could make a race worth while.

The family was assembled when Split reached the library and sat down, rebelliously sullen, beside Sissy. That young woman, though, wore an expression of purified patience, a submissive willingness to kiss the rod, that was eminently appropriate, however infuriating to the junior Madigans. But Sissy had known that it was coming. She could have foretold the martyrdom; all the signs of yesterday prophesied it, and she was reconciled.

It followed invariably that after the rare occasions when the pitiful curtain of his egotism had been blown aside by some chance breeze of destiny, and Francis Madigan had stood for a moment face to face with himself and his shirked responsibilities, he made the spasmodic effort to fulfil his paternal obligations, which the Madigans had learned to call their "martyring." He took from his library the book which had been most to him, which he had read all his life: for inspiration when he had been young and hopeful, for philosophy now that he was old and a failure. He was sincere in offering to his children the fruit of a great mind with comments by one that was sympathetic, able if not deep, and genuinely eager, for the moment, to share its enthusiasm.

But the sight of all this helpless though secretly critical womanhood disposed attentively about him invariably, through association of ideas, brought to his mind every similar and abortive attempt he had made in this direction. When he opened the book to read aloud to them, he was always irritated, with that deep-seated irascibility which has its foundation in self-discontent, however externals may influence or add to it.

Whatever Francis Madigan might have been, he was never intended for a pedagogue. His impatience of stupidity, his irritation at the slow, stumbling steps of immaturity, not to speak of his lack of judgment in his selection and his determination to persevere in reading aloud from the book of his choice, if he had to ram undigested wisdom whole into the mental stomachs of his offspring—all this would have deterred a less obstinate man. But Madigan, who had become a bully through weakness (forced to domineer unsuccessfully in his home by the conquering softness of his sister's disposition), had the bully's despairing consciousness of being in the wrong at the very moment of superficial victory; of being powerless in the very act of imposing himself upon his poor little women-folk; of recognizing the fact that, although he might lead them to the fountain of knowledge, he was unable to make them drink; and yet not daring to hesitate in his bullying, for fear that he might do nothing at all if he did not do this.

Now that his conscience was quickened, Madigan insisted to himself that the culture of his daughters' minds must be attended to. So he read aloud from "The Martyrdom of Man"; and enjoyed the sound of his voice—the irresistible accents of the cultured Irishman—a pleasure which the world shared with him; but not a martyred world of small women, over whose heads the long-sounding, musical periods of the poet-historian rolled, dropping only an occasional light shower of intelligence upon the untilled minds below.

"We will begin where we left off the last time," Madigan said harshly. He remembered how long it had been since "last time," and how much his audience had had time to forget. "Where was that? Were any of you interested enough to remember?"

Miss Madigan looked up from her work, like an amiable but very silly hen who pretends to make a mental effort, yet, unfortunately, has nothing to make that effort with. Kate, with the consciousness that she was really the only one of Madigan's children capable of following the line of the historian's thought, flushed guiltily. Irene sat like a prisoner, looking out into the balmy evening. She could hear cries of "Free home! Free home!" from down yonder in the paradise of the streets, in Crosby Pemberton's voice. Even Crosby, whose unnatural mother was the only lady of Split's acquaintance who was prejudiced against playing in the streets—even Crosby was out. While she—

"It was the fall of Carthage, wasn't it, father?" asked Sissy, sweetly.

If a glance from Split could have slain, Sissy had been dead. It was not the Madigan policy to encourage Francis Madigan in his belief that the seeds he sought to sow fell on fertile soil. If they had to be martyred in one sense, they declined to be in another. Besides, they knew and detested Sissy's hypocritical desire to "show off."

"It was, indeed, Cecilia," said Madigan, with a pathetic softening of his whole being. "'Tis a fine, stirring, terrible picture the historian gives us of the doomed city. Ahem!... 'And then, as if the birds of the air had carried the news, it became known all over northern Africa that Carthage was about to fall. And then, from the dark and dismal corners of the land, from the wasted frontiers of the desert, from the snowy lairs and caverns of the Atlas, there came creeping and crawling to the coast the most abject of the human race—black, naked, withered beings, their bodies covered with red paint, their hair cut in strange fashions, their language composed of muttering and whistling sounds. By day they prowled around the camp, and fought with the dogs for the offal and the bones. If they found a skin, they roasted it on ashes, and danced around it in glee, wriggling their bodies and uttering abominable cries. When the feast was over, they cowered together on their hams, and fixed their gloating eyes upon the city, and expanded their blubber-lips and showed their white fangs. At last-'"

A piercing scream came from Frances.

"Thousand devils!" Madigan burst forth, enraged at the interruption.

It was only that Bep and Fom, in the midst of a finger conversation carried on politely with a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, had had their attention attracted by the ghastly word-picture made so vivid by their father's voice. So, wearying of the innocuous desuetude of things, it occurred to them to present for Frank's entertainment a bodily representation of what the words meant to their minds. Safe in the obscurity of the table-cloth's circular shadow, down on the floor they wriggled, they prowled, they cowered and gloated and expanded their blubber-lips and showed their fangs. If they did not utter abominable cries, it was only because that particular detail was not needed to send the smallest Madigan into hysterics.

"Leave the room!" cried Madigan. "Leave the room, you ox!" looking wrathfully, but generally, down at the disturbance.

And three small Madigans, feeling that they had paid a small price for freedom, crept and crawled to the door—the most abject of the Madigan race till they were fairly outside, when they became the most jubilant.

"'At last,'" went on Madigan, a lingering growl of resentment in his voice, "'the day came. The harbor walls were carried by assault and the Roman soldiers passed into—'"

"Father," interrupted Sissy, with the exasperating air of one who knows how soothing she is (like many a talented person, she was irretrievably ruined by her first success and she felt very intelligent)—"father, in what part of Rome was Carthage?"

Behind her father's back Split mouthed a threat of vengeance and shook her fist at the interested Sissy for wilfully prolonging the session. But at Madigan's snort of disgust, the Indian profile of Split, below its bushy crown of red, shone out malevolently. She did not know what Sissy had done; she knew only that she had done something.

Sissy met her glance, and returned it with dignity. "I didn't mean that, father, you know," she said priggishly. "I meant, of course, in what part of Carthage was Rome."

"Oh, you did!" Madigan's smile was not pleasant.

"Ye-es," said Sissy, uncertainly.

"Well," said Madigan, explosively, "Rome was in the same part of Carthage as Carthage was of Rome."

His jaw was set now, and his glowing dark eyes beneath their white shaggy brows as he sought his place in the book were not encouraging. But the enigmatic character of his response was not enough for Sissy, dazed, yet greedy for glory. She glanced from Split, in whose ear Kate was whispering something that seemed vastly to delight her, to her father, who had begun to read again.

"I don't remember, father, please," she said as he paused a moment to clear his throat. "What part was that?"

A sputtering giggle broke from Split. It was unlucky, for it turned Madigan's wrath upon her.

"Outside!" he commanded, pointing to the door. "Outside, you ox!..."

"'Six days passed thus,'" the reading began again. (In almost the moment the door had closed behind her, Split could be heard flying down the outside steps two at a time. That he was sorely tried, Madigan's voice showed plainly, and his shrunken audience looked apprehensively at one another). "'Six days passed thus and only the citadel was left. It was a steep rock in the middle of the town; a temple of the god of healing crowned the summit.' The god of healing, Cecilia," he put in, with a contempt that mantled the perfectionist's check with a resentful red, "means that particular deity—"

A soft little snore came from Miss Madigan. Her head had fallen to one side, and the lamp-light shone on her soft, pretty, high-colored face, placid in its repose as a baby's.

In the moment that Madigan paused and looked at her, Sissy's hand sought Kate's in terror. But the reader controlled himself with an effort, remembering possibly that, after all, it was not his sister but his daughters he was educating.

"'The rock was covered with people,'" he went on, skipping the explanation he had intended giving to Sissy. And he read on for some minutes without interruption, becoming more and more interested himself in the vivid picture as it unrolled, and half declaiming it in his enthusiasm, with a verve that accounted for Sissy's successful rendition of "The Polish Boy" at school entertainments. "'The trumpets sounded,'" he sang out. "'The soldiers, clashing their bucklers with their swords and uttering the war-cry Alala! Alala! advanced in—'"

"Mercy me!" exclaimed Miss Madigan, waked by his realistic shout, and blinking her bright little eyes to accustom them to the light.

"Anne," said Madigan, tensely, "if you are not interested, you—are not obliged to listen, of course. But it would be more—civil to withdraw if—"

"Not interested?" she repeated, with gentle surprise, as she took up her crocheting again. "Why, it's very interesting—most interesting; don't you find it so, Kate?"

"'A man dressed in purple rushed out of the temple with an olive-branch in his hand,'" Madigan began again, all the ardor gone from his voice. "'This was Hasdrubal, the commander-in-chief, and the Robespierre of the Reign of Terror. His—'"

"Missy Kate—want chocolate—picnic—" Wong stood open-mouthed in the doorway. Consciousness of having interrupted the master, as well as amazement at beholding him out of his own room after dinner, was too much for him.

"What do you want, Wong?" demanded Madigan, harshly.

"Notting—oh, notting," murmured Wong, deprecatingly. "One picnic, sabe, t'-malla morning."

"Irene—I mean Cecilia—Thousand devils!—Kate," stormed Madigan, in his rage forgetting his daughter's precise appellation, "go out into the kitchen and give your orders. If you had the least grain of common sense you'd know that the first duty of a housekeeper is to have some system about her work; to do things at the right time and not to interrupt the evening's entertainment." He gulped a bit at this, though Kate's dropped lids quickly hid the ironical gleam in her eye. "Well, why don't you go—and stay? You might as well, or you'll forget something else and interrupt us again."

A desire to make herself look very numerous, intelligent, and appreciative possessed Sissy as the door closed on her big sister. She was in the familiar frame of mind in which she disapproved of her sisters, yet she was terrified lest, if she gave him time, her father might draw the same inference that she had.

"Perhaps you'll let me read aloud for a while, father. Mr. Garvan often has me read things to the class," she suggested quickly, when she saw he was about to close the book.

Madigan hesitated. A succession of infuriating trifles had beat upon his temper till it was worn thin. But Sissy's outstretched hand conquered merely by suggestion. He put the book before her, pointed to the place, got to his feet, and began pacing to and fro.

"'Carthage burned seventeen days before it was entirely consumed,'" read Sissy. "'Then the plow was passed over the soil to put an end in legal form to the existence of the city. House might never be built, corn might never be sown, upon the ground where it had stood.'"

She read well, did Sissy, as she did most things. Little by little Madigan's sharp, quick steps became less and less the bodily expression of exasperated nerves, and tuned themselves to the meter of that pretty, childish voice, intelligently giving utterance to the thoughtful philosophy that had always soothed him. It lost some of its familiarity and gained a new charm, coming from that small, round mouth which had an almost faultless instinct for pronunciation. A feeble germ of fatherly pride began to sprout beneath the soil upon which the child's intelligent reading fell like a warm, spring rain.

"One moment, Cecilia." Madigan stopped in his walk, lifting an apologetic hand to excuse the interruption. "You read just now of 'the Britons of Cornwall gathering on high places and straining their eyes toward the west; the ships which had brought them beads and purple cloth would come again no more.' Now, to what does that refer?"

Sissy's hands flew to her breast; and before she had time to conceal, to pretend, to affect, he had seen the blank expression of her face. You see, she had been merely reading; not thinking. The sound of her own voice had drowned the sense. To read intelligently a thing the comprehension of which was far over her head was the utmost this eleven-year-old could do. She had not the vaguest idea what she had been reading. It was all a blank!

Madigan stood petrified; and the last little martyred ox, stuffing her apron into her mouth, that she might not weep aloud, hurried from the room.

A moment longer Madigan stood. Then he looked at Miss Madigan. That lady's placid face had not changed a particle. She sat crocheting what she called a fascinator, her white bone needle moving harmoniously in and out of the blue wool. Had she heard a word that had been read? Her brother knew better than to ask. Did it make the least difference to her whether he read from "The Martyrdom of Man" or not?

Madigan shut the book with a bang. The "martyring," boomerang that it had proved, was over.

* * * * *

The world seems new-born every summer morning in Virginia City. This little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright—an open, boundless breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the fresh, shining virginity of the new-created.

It was the sense of a nature-miracle, and the desire to penetrate still farther and higher into the crystalline sky that crowned it, which sent the Madigans every summer toiling up Mount Davidson. They did not know it, but yearly the Wanderlust seized them, and as all things in Virginia point one way, they followed that suggestion—upward.

They were spared the usual struggle with Frances (who, after being coaxed, bribed, threatened, and bullied, had at last annually to be run away from), for the reason that Frank had not slept well after the martyring, and was still dreaming of creeping, crawling things with blubber-lips and gloating eyes when, in the pellucid dawn, Jack Cody found the Madigans waiting, in clean calicoes, perched on their bottommost step.

The sun was barely over the top of Sugar Loaf, and the town, scantily shrubberied (for water costs as many dollars in Virginia as there are weeks in the year), lay sleeping in soft chill shadow below them, looking oddly picturesque and strange in the unfamiliar light.

"Say," said Cody, "I think I see that Pemberton kid coming up Taylor. Is he coming along?"

"No," said Sissy, promptly.

"Yes," said Split, firmly.

"Well, I didn't ask him," from Sissy, with a haughty air of saying the last word. The Madigans were quite accustomed to being social arbiters in their own small world.

"Well, I did," remarked Split, easily.

A pugnacious red overshot Sissy's face. Crosby was her property, to browbeat and maltreat as seemed best to her. She felt that Irene's interference in a matter that was purely personal was unwarranted as it was intolerable.

"He always has such good cream-tarts," explained Split.

"Well, he can have 'em and keep 'em," declared Sissy, savagely, turning her back as Crosby yodeled a greeting and waved his hat gaily to her.

Cody grinned. "I think that kid better stay at home. It won't be much picnic for him, will it, Sissy?"

Sissy sniffed. "He's Split's company," she said loftily. "She'll make things pleasant for him."

But Crosby, glad to be among the enticing Madigans at any price, and innocently joying in the picnic spirit that possessed him, came whooping to his fate.

"Say," he said eagerly, putting down his basket with the air of one who has a good story to tell, "do you know, I almost got caught this morning. Ma said I wasn't to go, but I bet I wouldn't stay at home. So I told Delia to put up my lunch last night, and to put in a lot of those cream-tarts you like, Sissy—you used to like, Sissy...."

But Sissy, actuated by a delicate desire not to interfere in the slightest with Split's plans for the entertainment of her guest, was deep in conversation with Jack Cody. Crosby's jaw fell. He saw her give her round tin lunch-bucket—the one he had so often carried to school for her—to Cody, to sling with his own upon a leather strap. And as he watched her start up the ravine carrying one end of the strap, and the washerwoman's boy the other, he wondered passionately within himself at the faithlessness and ingratitude of women.

Wasn't it enough to have a reckoning with Madam Pemberton at the end of his day, without having that precious time utterly spoiled? He felt like turning back. Sissy knew well that there could be no picnic for him within the pale of her displeasure. The mountain air might be never so sweet with the wild sage perfuming it; the sun striping the shadowy town below with bloody bands might be never so promising; the mountain's peak, soft and deceitfully near, might be never so tempting—with Sissy chattering gaily in advance, ostentatiously ignorant of his very existence, the glory was cut out of Crosby's morn. It seemed, too, to him that he had never been so fond of her. His mother's disapproval of this Madigan since a certain episode (to avenge which cruel Sissy's thirst could never be slaked) had put the last touch to his devotion. That matron's pleasure in their intercourse hitherto had been the one drawback to his delight in it. In his eyes, his inamorata walked now with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being "the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.

At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and shirts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's. So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the assertive masculinity of her attire.

It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic, though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of the day he would realize that that course would have been the least painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was; not in the division-of-labor fashion, from which Cody's and Sissy's jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily along, far in advance.

Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have made him tender to the vicissitudes of sex as warranted by clothing), something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.

"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke along. They'll never get to the top."

Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in her nostrils. Her skirt was torn, and the short-stemmed desert-lilies she held in a moist hand were wilted. But she was happy, for she was outdoing, she was pretending, and she was punishing. The only thing that detracted from her pleasure was to be obliged to concur in Cody's opinion. That roused her perversity. She loved to lead or to oppose—not to agree.

"Let's go on," she said imperiously. "What are you stopping for?"

As the sun climbed higher, the mountain's top got farther and farther away. But Cody, who had scaled not only its summit, but the flagpole that tipped it, knew its habit of piling one small hill up behind the other, as though, like a grotesque Gulliver playing a practical joke, it delighted in fatiguing and disappointing the Liliputians that swarmed up from its base. Crosby and Bombey and the twins, with the Misses Blind-Staggers,—blinder than ever to-day for the glare on their blue goggles,—had yielded long since. They were camping patiently in a ravine far below, where a tiny spring hinted at dining-room conveniences. The rest of the party, with Irene revenging herself upon Kate's disloyalty by sticking like a burr to that young lady (whom, Split thought, Mr. Garvan was treating altogether too much like a young lady), was close on the vanguard's heels. And Sissy and Cody, panting now, but toiling doggedly on, had reached the cool little cup-shaped hollow in the cone where the snow lies.

From here to the top was but a few minutes' run. Cody was all for halting and snow-balling the party as it came up, but Sissy was too exhausted to stop now.

"We'll rest at the top of the hill," she decided impatiently, and hurried him on, both a bit out of temper.

No beauty of winding river and peaceful valley checkered with fields of grain, no low-lying gardens and climbing forests, reward the scaler of the heights behind the Comstock—only the bare little brown town far down, digging tenacious heels into the mountain's side and propped up with spindle-shanked foothold, the great white inverted cones of steam rising from the mines, the naked and scarred majesty of the gray mountains all about, the desert gleaming like a lake in the east, and Washoe Lake gleaming like a desert in the west.

Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her hands—a small, petticoated Balboa—to the world she had discovered. "It—it makes you want to scream," she stammered.

"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.

Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.

She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating brassily, gave vent to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which he was one.

Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her, was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking the sand out of her shoe.

"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some cream-puffs for you."

But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."

With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gushing over her cheeks and chin.

But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume is carried.

Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pass first. Yet she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure, relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew. In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.

It was all over with Sissy. Trembling with terror, she sat down, clutching the edge of the board beneath her, the world swimming away before her shut eyes, just as it did when one looked too long through a knot-hole at the flowing race in the flume beneath.

Irene's giggle came faintly to her; she was too terrified to resent it. The murmur of voices that called her name, encouragingly, warningly, angrily, was not so loud as the chuckling of the water in the box which seemed to hurry her senses away. She lived through years of agony, in which she found herself wishing that she could only fall and end it. Then she felt the trestle bound beneath her, and she was waked by the touch of Crosby's hand.

"Get up!" he said in a tone of command that reminded her of that grenadier his mother.

She opened her eyes and saw that his face was white, but the glitter of determination in his eyes was so new and curious that it held her attention for the moment necessary to give her strength to obey. He almost pulled her to her feet, and then half dragged, half ran with her across. Yet within ten feet of the end, the trembling of his hand had communicated itself to her whole body. She watched the drops of perspiration fall from his pale face and, fascinated, followed them down with her eyes. Then wrenching her hand from his, she almost fell down again. It seemed to her her head swayed back and forth with such force as might bear her whole body with it, and she squatted down, shivering.

It was a most humiliating finish to an exciting adventure, for when he strove to compel her again to rise, Crosby found that terror is contagious. He himself dared not stand. He squatted down in front of her, and on all fours the two crawled toward the bank. Sissy could have kissed the earth when her hands touched it.

But it took her some time to recover. The sympathetic fussing of the Misses Bryne-Stivers she endured as in a dream. She even permitted Mr. Garvan to take her hand and help her walk for a time. But when they reached the first house and had turned down Taylor Street, she was so thoroughly herself that she contrived to let the rest pass her, and she rested till Crosby came up. She was walking beside him, with a sudden flattering kindness that almost turned his head, when he looked in the direction in which her eyes were fixed, and saw his mother in her phaeton pull up and beckon to him.

He looked shyly at Sissy. He would have given much to be told that this forgiveness was not to be merely temporary, like others that had preceded it whenever Mrs. Pemberton might see and disapprove; that he was no longer to be flouted and scorned when there was nobody but Sissy herself to be glad of it.

"The shadow of the guillotine is over you!" said Sissy, in a bombastic whisper addressed to Mrs. Pemberton—a comforting formula the Madigans had invented to still their envy of those who rode in carriages. But her smiling face, when it turned toward Crosby, had no threat in it.

Relieved, forgiven, reinstated,—for there was a promise without words in his tyrant's good humor,—Crosby laughed out gaily. At that moment he had no more fear for Madam Pemberton than for the invoked Madame Guillotine.

"S' long, Sissy," he cried, waving his basket to her as he went, a young aristocrat, to meet his fate.

That night Sissy said her prayers in a rush. She wanted to give her undivided attention to plans of revenge on Split.



KATE: A PRETENSE

The lesser Madigans meant to stand no nonsense from Kate. Other girls' big sisters had been known to assume superiority as their skirts lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se—just let Kate try it!

Kate did, being human, a Comstock girl when girls were in a delightful minority, and a Madigan. But, realizing the argus-eyed watch put upon her, and the forthright methods of her sister Madigans, she tried it secretly.

To be sure, there was old Westlake,—he was at least thirty-five years old—whose intentions were quite apparent. He came up to play whist at the house whenever he was in town, upon which occasions Kate was always his partner; and he scolded her with the same proprietary freedom for leading a "sneak" suit as Francis Madigan did his sister—a lady who was never known to know what was trumps, and who smiled and blinked and blushed and made the same mistakes over and over again with a complacency that Madigan's fiercest thumps upon the table could not shake.

But the Madigans forgave Kate her Westlake, for the pleasure she took in guying him, and the loyal frankness with which she let them into all the moves of the game. He was "The Avalanche" to her and to them, because of his avoirdupois, his slow movements, and the imperviousness to a joke with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little infinity of homely facetiae in which the Madigans lived and had their being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to her oldest niece!

"Fly, the Avalanche is upon you!" was Sissy's dramatic way of warning her big sister that her suitor had been spied by the outpost coming up the steps.

And on such occasions Kate could slip out of the side door and be safely inside the Misses Blind-Staggers's sitting-room by the time Westlake's heavy step made the porch shake—and Sissy, too—with laughter. But this was before she went to open the door.

"Is your sister at home?" old Westlake asked confidently.

"Which one—Irene? Yes, she's home." Sissy's small round face was simplicity and candor incarnate.

"No," said old Westlake, uncomfortably. He had seen shrewdness once or twice behind the eyes where innocence now dwelt, and he only half trusted this demure, blank-faced child. "I mean your sister Katherine."

"Oh!" Cecilia exclaimed, in gentle surprise. "Oh, no, sir, she's out."

"Indeed!"

Old Westlake fancied he heard a mocking "indeed" that followed. In fact, an echo that had the queer effect of making him hear double seemed to accompany all his words. It came from the portieres, which were suspiciously bulky, and shook as though something more than the wind moved them.

"And how soon will she be home?" he asked.

"Kate? You mean Kate? Oh, I really do not know." Sissy pronounced her words with pedantic care—a permissible thing among Madigans when adults were to be guyed.

Old Westlake (he was rather a handsome old fellow, with his regular features, his blond mustache, and prominent blue eyes) fidgeted uneasily. There must be some way, he felt, of moderating this half-chilly, half-critical atmosphere on the part of the smaller Madigans. But children were riddles to him, and the solutions his small experience offered were either too simple or too complex.

"She can't be intending to spend the whole day out?" he asked, conscious that he presented a ridiculous figure to the childish gray eyes lifted to his.

"No, I don't suppose she can," agreed Sissy. "Won't you come in?"

He followed her hesitatingly into the parlor and sat down, his eyes fixed upon the portieres over the front windows, which still appeared to be strangely agitated.

"You—do you think it will be worth while—my waiting?" he asked helplessly, as Cecilia was modestly about to withdraw.

She looked up at him with the bland look of intelligence which it takes a clever child to counterfeit.

"Worth while waiting for Kate?" she asked in accents half puzzled, half reproachful.

Old Westlake blushed to the roots of his close-cropped fair hair. He fancied he heard a muffled gurgle behind the portieres that wasn't soothing.

"Oh—you mean, is she likely to come home soon?" added Sissy, gravely, eying his discomfiture. "I really do not know."

"Is Miss Madigan in?" asked the desperate man.

"Why, do you call her that? I told you she was out."

"No; you told me Katherine was out. Is she in?" he asked eagerly.

Sissy stared at him stupidly. He returned her stare contemplatively. He yearned to bribe her, but he didn't dare. She looked too old to be bought, too young to understand; yet he was sure she was neither.

"Katherine, Kate, and Miss Madigan are out," said Sissy, didactically. "So are Kitty, Kathleen, and even Kathy—that's her latest; she wrote it that way in Henrietta Bryne-Stivers's autograph-album."

The visitor looked bewildered. "I asked you whether your aunt is in," he said, with some impatience.

"I beg your pardon," retorted Sissy, ceremoniously. No Madigan begged pardon unless intending to be doubly offensive thereafter. "You asked me whether my sister was in."

"Is—your—aunt—in?" demanded Westlake, with insulting clearness.

"She—is—in. I'll—tell—her—you're—here."

"Please." Westlake bit the word out, promising himself that his first post-nuptial act would be to shake this small sister-in-law well for her impertinence.

And this was the pathos, as well as the absurdity of old Westlake—he was so confident.

But he was not so confident that he did not long for an ally. And when Split stepped out from behind the portieres, with a barefaced pretense of having just come through the long French window from the porch, he straightway invited her to go to the circus that evening with him and Kate.

There happened to be two sties on Split's left eye just then, and a third on the upper eyelid of the right one. But this, of course, was no reason for discouraging the overtures of a poor old man like Westlake, who, it appeared to Split, had some virtues, after all.