"You're the prettiest girl I've seen since I left the city, Irene," patronizingly whispered the boy lately from San Francisco, whose metropolitan elegances had dazzled the eyes of the mountain maidens.
"I wonder how many girls Will Morrow's said that to this afternoon!" came like a sarcastic douche from Sissy, who conceived it to be a chaperon's duty to take the conceit out of citified chaps.
Young Morrow turned to find a small woman in brown eying him disdainfully.
"Well—well, I never said it to you, anyway," he retorted gallantly.
"Good reason why. You knew I wouldn't believe you," Sissy declared, floundering in her anger.
"Neither would anybody else."
The Belle of the Afternoon
"The Belle of the Afternoon"
"Why? Because you said it? Didn't know you had such a reputation." Sissy was recovering. "Never mind, Split," she added,heavily sarcastic and assuming a comforting air that maddened Irene, who desired nothing more than to impress her new suitor with the elegant gentility of her manner, her family's, and all that was hers. "Just to have a boy from the city even pretend to think you're good-looking is worth living for. Boys know so much—in the city!" she concluded witheringly.
Mr. Morrow from San Francisco looked bewildered. He had merely paid what he considered a very dashing compliment to one girl, when lo! the other overwhelmed him with her contempt. He turned for consolation to Irene.
"I'll show you how they dance the two-step in the city," he said, holding out his hand as the music began again.
But he had reckoned without that stern censor of sisterly manners, Cecilia Madigan; that loyal Comstocker who resented the implication of her town's inferiority, quite independent of the fact that the insult was not addressed to her but to one who, apparently, welcomed it.
"I think I'll go home now, Split," she remarked carelessly, rising.
A sudden blight fell upon the belle of the afternoon. When Sissy went, go she must, too; this was the sole rule of conduct FrancisMadigan had devised for the guidance of his most headstrong daughter.
"Oh, Sissy—not till after supper!" she pleaded piteously.
"I—I've got some studying to do for the examination Monday," explained the exemplary member of Mr. Garvan's class and society at large.
"Just wait till this one dance is over!" Coaxing was not Split Madigan's forte; she was accustomed to demand.
But it was just that one dance that Sissy, the pure and patriotic, could not countenance.
A quick flash of fury lighted Irene's eye. To be bossed publicly and before Mr. Will Morrow of San Francisco! In her heart she swore to be avenged; yet she dropped Mr. Morrow's hand and shook her head to all his pleadings, as she followed her ruthless tyrant across the floor to the little dressing-room.
But as the sisters emerged from the dressing-room door, Crosby Pemberton and his cousin Fred stopped them.
"You're not going home, Split?" begged Fred. "I've been looking everywhere for you. Oh, come and dance just this one with me!"
"Sissy's going," said Split, the lilting ofthe music stirring her pulses and lifting her feet, despite the unmusical rage she was in, "and I've got to go, too."
"Won't you stay—won't you wait just for this one, Sissy?" begged Fred.
"Why—certainly," acquiesced the gentle Sissy.
Split gasped with amazement. But she wasted no time, throwing off her jacket with a quick twist of her wrist. Later she might fathom the tortuosities of her tyrant's mind. All she knew now was that she might dance. With whom was a small matter to Split Madigan.
Sissy watched her dance away, delight and malice in her eye. She was watching till Mr. Morrow from the city should behold her revenge. But Crosby did not know this, and he had plans of his own.
"Come and play a game over in the corner, just till this dance's over, won't you, Sissy?"
"What kind of a game?" she demanded, following him mechanically.
"Oh, a new game. It's lots of fun. I'll show you."
Sissy consented. She could play a game—and she knew she was clever at all games—without fear of betrayal from that red shamwhich she had been fiercely sitting upon half the afternoon.
Before long, her emulative spirit got her so interested in this particular game that she forgot not only the sham skirt but the sham pretense upon which she had bullied Irene. And she played so well that there was only one forfeit against her name, though Crosby, who had named himself treasurer, held half the bangle bracelets and pins and handkerchiefs of the little circle as evidence of dereliction in others.
He called her name first, as he stood with her little turquoise ring in his hand and an odd light in his eye that might have enlightened her; but she was looking toward the door, where the young gentleman from San Francisco, in a Byronic pose, was staring gloomily at Irene dancing with a rival, and so joying in the dance that she had forgotten all about him.
"Open your mouth and shut your eyes,And I'll give you something to make you wise,"
"Open your mouth and shut your eyes,And I'll give you something to make you wise,"
chanted Crosby, holding out the ring and beckoning to her.
Closing her eyes upon the spectacle of Mr.Morrow's suffering, Sissy opened a mouth about which the malicious smile still lingered.
Crosby hesitated a moment. He was very much afraid of her, but as she stood, docile and innocent, before him, with her eyes shut and her tiny red mouth open, he could not fancy consequences nearly so well as he could picture the thing his wish painted.
In a moment he had realized it, and Sissy, overwhelmed by astonishment, dumb and impotent with the audacity of the unexpected, felt his arms close about her and his greedy lips upon hers.
Oh, the rage and shame of the proper Sissy! Her mouth fell shut and her eyes flew open. And then, if she could, she would have closed them forever; for, before her in the sudden silence, towering above the triumphant and unrepentant Crosby, stood Mrs. Pemberton, a portentous figure of shocked matronly disapproval. And she promptly placed the blame where mothers of sons have placed it since the first similar impropriety was discovered.
"Cecilia!" she cried in that velvety bass that echoed through the room—"Cecilia Madigan, you—teaching my son a vulgar kissing game—you, the good one! Oh, you deceitful little thing!"
It had been Crosby Pemberton's custom to climb the steps that led to Madigan's every Wednesday afternoon at four, with his music neatly done up in a roll, on his way to play duets with Sissy.
On the Wednesday that followed his birthday party—the mere mention of which, after the lapse of four days, was enough to send Sissy into hysterics—that young lady was seated in the parlor, ready for her guest. She was ready for him in all the senses a Madigan knew how to infuse into that frame of mind. She intended to make him as miserable as she herself had been ever since that disgraceful episode in which she had so innocently played the victim's part. She would show the betrayer of trust no mercy—none. She would accept no apology. She would trample upon his excuses and tear them limb from limb. She would show him her scorn and detestation and make him feel how everlastingly unforgivablehis offense was; then she would send him forth forever from the house, and dare him to so much as speak to her at school.
She pictured him going down the stairs for the last time, utterly wretched, broken, despised, condemned. And in order to make the picture more real, she glanced out of the window. Suddenly her hands flew in terror to her breast, and all her plans for vengeance were left hanging in mid-air; for it was not Crosby's trim little figure that was climbing the steps, but the stately solidity of Mrs. Pemberton herself.
In her extremity, Sissy did not even stop to look at the back legs of the piano; she sped across the room and made a flying leap through the low west window. Mrs. Pemberton, glancing in through the open door as she rang the bell, got a glimpse of two plump disappearing legs, but when she and Miss Madigan entered, there was no trace of Sissy except her jackstones. They stumbled over these, lying scattered on the floor, where she had been sitting waiting for Crosby and concocting schemes of punishment.
"I come to explain—" said Mrs. Pemberton, stiffly and a bit out of breath, seating herself with a rigidity of backbone that would havejustified Sissy's bestowal upon her of the nickname Mrs. Ramrod, if she could have seen it. But Sissy, lying attentive beneath the open window, could not see; she could only hear. "I am here to tell you, Miss Madigan, why Crosby did not come to-day to play duets."
"Dear me! didn't he come?" asked Miss Madigan, absently. "He isn't sick, is he? Irene complains of headache and backache, and she's so languid she let Sissy get the wish-bone—I call it the bone of contention—at dinner yesterday without a struggle. I'm half afraid she'll not be able to sing to-night at Professor Trask's concert; but perhaps it's only that she danced too much at Crosby's party. She al—"
"It's about that—about the party that I wanted to speak to you," interrupted Mrs. Pemberton, severely.
"Yes? Such a lovely party, the girls say! I'm sure, Mrs. Pemberton, it's just—"
"Did they tell you what—occurred?"
Miss Madigan blinked reflectively. Her acquaintance with the stately and wealthy Mrs. Warren Pemberton was her most prized social connection. What could have occurred?
"Why, of course, of course!" she laughed after a bit, pleasantly, still trying to remember what the girls had gossiped about. "Delightful, wasn't it?"
Mrs. Pemberton lifted her plumed head with a slow and terrible solemnity. "De-lightful, Miss Madigan, de-lightful!"
The smile vanished from Miss Madigan's face. "I hope, dear Mrs. Pemberton, that the girls did nothing that—that—They're such madcaps, and their father never will—"
Miss Madigan's distress touched her august visitor. "I trust this," she said significantly, "will be a lesson to Mr. Madigan."
"What—what will? If there's a lesson for Madigan, let him have it direct, Mrs. Pemberton."
Lying flat on her stomach beneath the window, Sissy heard her father's voice come clanging harshly on the lighter-timbred dialogue. Cautiously she raised herself on her elbow and let a single eye peer through the curtain at the group within. There, with his paint-pot in his hand, his brush and his pipe in the other, his unique nightcap rakishly on one side and drawn over his white head to protect it from the paint, Madigan stood in his overalls and heavy shirt—his Michelangelo costume, Kate had called it. He had been regilding an old mirror in his room, and having some giltleft at the bottom of his can, he was going about the house in search of tarnished articles of virtue.
"Oh, Francis!" exclaimed his sister.
"Why, how do you do, Mr. Madigan?" said Mrs. Pemberton, bravely, putting out her hand. "I did not know you were within hearing."
"Or you wouldn't have offered the lesson? Well, give it to me, now that I am here. No, I won't shake hands; mine are all sticky with gilt." He rested his elbow on his hip and stood at ease.
A savage delight at this outrage upon gentility in Mrs. Ramrod's very presence possessed that red republican Sissy. She giggled within herself, Madigan's attitude, his streaked and gilded face, his confident voice, showed such delightful indifference to the effect his unconventional attire must have upon this Priestess of Form.
"I must beg your pardon, Mr. Madigan," said that lady, in her most official tone, "for using the expression I did. The matter I wished to bring to Miss Madigan's attention—and to yours, now that you are here—concerns one of your daughters. I should have come to tell you of it before, as was my duty, as I would wish any mother to do for me were itmy daughter; but I have been busy helping the Misses Bryne-Stivers and Professor Trask with this concert for to-night. This must be my apology for the delay. For speaking—for telling you what I have to tell, no mother could apologize."
"H'm!" Madigan cleared his throat threateningly, and out in the sage-brush Sissy shook with apprehension. She knew that preliminary bugle-call to battle.
"I assure you, my dear Mrs. Pemberton, we can have only the kindest feelings for any one who will take an interest in those motherless—"
"Let Mrs. Pemberton go on, Anne," interrupted Madigan, harshly. "Just what is it, ma'am? Out with it."
Mrs. Pemberton rose, rustling her heavy silks.
"Merely, Mr. Madigan, that with my own eyes I saw your daughter take part in a vulgar kissing game—the only occurrence of any kind that marred the perfect propriety of my son's birthday party."
There was a long silence inside. Sissy, without, her heart beating so loud that she was afraid it might drown all other sounds, heard, despite it, Aunt Anne's gasp of horror, thetinkle of the jet on Mrs. Pemberton's heavy gown, the squeaking of her father's paint-spotted slippers as he shifted his weight.
Finally it came. "That ox!" exclaimed Madigan, in a rage.
Mrs. Pemberton moved in majesty toward the door. "My son," she said slowly, "chivalrously tries to take the blame from her and insists that he proposed the game himself. But I know Crosby to be incapable of such a thing."
"H'm! Yes. So do I," assented Madigan.
Miss Madigan turned to her brother, and in a voice that suggested long years of martyrdom, said: "You will send her to the convent now, Francis? You positively must now. I really admire you for the way you have discharged a most unpleasant duty, Mrs. Pemberton. For years I've insisted that Irene must—"
"Irene? Yes, if it had been Irene, one could expect it," remarked Mrs. Pemberton, funereally.
"But it wasn't—it couldn't be—"
"It was Cecilia." Mrs. Pemberton's grief-stricken tones conveyed all the disappointment she felt.
Cecilia, on her quaking knees, now peeringthrough the window, saw a quick change come over her father's dread countenance. It smoothed, it wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.
"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"
"It was"—Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr. Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity involved in its completion—"my son Crosby."
"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.
Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly, though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at. As nearly destitute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.
"Crosby—eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't know the little milksop had it in him. You ought tothank Sissy, ma'am, for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she, anyway?"
Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.
But outside Sissy wept and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged—that her own father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her very soul!
A taste for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular features of his production must be a failure—this last as a matter of course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in lending children self-confidence as talent itself.
Kate, therefore, who could not sing a note, but who was grace embodied, led a chorus of Poppies, whose red tissue-paper garments creaked and rustled as they swayed, waving their star-tipped wands and chanting "Breathe we now our charmed fragrance."
Florence and Bessie, whom the curse of being twins linked like galley-slaves, were Heather-bells in a childish chorus which piped forth the information "We are the Heather-bells: list to our song," but which was almost ruined by their common desire to get away from each other and lead in two different directions.
She was pronounced a regular little love by the Misses Bryne-Stivers
"She was pronounced a 'regular little love' by the Misses Bryne-Stivers"
Quite self-possessed (even if she was very much off key), Sissy, who was the best "speaker" in her class, warbled her part of a sanctimonious little duet in which Heliotrope and Mignonette voiced the sentiment—
"'Tis not in beauty alone we may findPurity, goodness, and wisdom combined"
"'Tis not in beauty alone we may findPurity, goodness, and wisdom combined"
Even small Frances, most self-conscious of Madigans, in a costume so inadequate that Bep's doll would have been scandalized at the idea of wearing it, posed and attitudinized as a Dewdrop. She was pronounced a "regular little love" by the Misses Bryne-Stivers, whom the Madigans had nicknamed the Misses Blind-Staggers—a resentful play upon their hyphenated name, as well as a delicate reference to their blue goggles that might have served as blinkers.
For Irene, though, as the unquestioned possessor of a voice, a solo had been interpolated. She was to repeat, for the first time on the professional stage, that renowned success in "The Zingara" which school exhibitions had made famous.
Just before the time came for Split to sing, Sissy was hovering about the prima donna in the dressing-room. As Miss Heliotrope she wore the dark-purple gown which Aunt Anne had made over from her own wardrobe. (Being Comstock-born, Sissy knew no flower intimately, and could easily be imposed upon as to their habits and colors.) Above it her round little dark face looked almost sallow, in spite of the excited red that flamed in her cheeks.
The atmosphere of a theater was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of escaping gasin the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by association of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a dramatic situation was the one evidence of sensibility they permitted themselves.
Yet Sissy, who was tying the ribbons on Split's tambourine, looked in vain for a reflection of that fever of delight which possessed herself. Split was cross. She was languid. She was dull. She did not seem to enjoy even the pair of slippers she was pulling on. They had been given to Sissy by Henrietta Blind-Staggers, and their newness and beauty had tempted the poor Zingara. But if Sissy had not felt that the family fortunes were at stake, as she always did in the matter of a public appearance, she would never have made so generous an offer of her cherished property.
"But they seem awful tight, Split," she suggested.
"They're nothing of the sort," snapped Split, wincing as she rose to her feet.
"I don't see how you're going to dance in them."
"Will you just leave that to me, Miss Cecilia Morgan Madigan, and mind your own business?"
I don't see how you're going to dance in them
"'I don't see how you're going to dance in them'"
Deeply offended, Sissy withdrew. No one called her Cecilia Morgan Madigan who did not want to wound her to the soul and remind her of an incident it were more generous to forget. She went out to the wings and stood there looking upon the stage and Professor Trask, who, as the Recluse, was gowned in mysterious flowing black, while he chanted "Here would I rest" in a hollow bass. But Sissy was worried. Not even being behind the scenes could still her apprehensions about Split. She longed to confide in some fellow-Madigan, but Kate was on the other side of the stage, and to all her winks and beckonings turned an uninterested back. Then, all at once, sooner than she expected, the Recluse departed, the scenes shifted; there, alone on the stage, looking white in the glare of the footlights, was a bedizened, big-eyed, panting little Zingara, and the syncopated prelude began.
Sissy's fingers thrummed it sympathetically upon her knee, but Trask, who was playing the accompaniment behind the scenes, had put an unfamiliar accent upon the notes. Out on the stage the Zingara was beating her tambourine sadly out of time and was longing, with a panicky fear, for the familiar touch of Sissy's hand upon the piano.
"Dum—dum-de-dum-dum—dum-dum—dum-dum!"
The notes came like a warning signal. The Zingara's throat was parched, her feet ached excruciatingly merely from carrying her weight—how, oh, how was she going to dance?
"Dum—dum-de-dum-dum—dum-dum—dum-dum!"
The last note prolonged itself into a summons. The Zingara's eye, turning from the faces that danced before her, sent appealing glances to the wings, where Sissy yearned toward her, all rivalry drowned in a mothering anxiety for her success.
"'I'm a—mer-ry, meh-hi-ri-y—Zin-ga-ra!'" wailed Split, trying to get her breath. "'From a—gold-e-en—clime I come!'"
Sissy's hands flew to her breast, then with a wild gesture up over her ears, and she fled back to the dressing-room. Split the redoubtable, Split the invincible, the impudent, ready, pugnacious Split had stage-fright! The world rocked beneath Sissy's feet. Time stopped, and all the world stood agape witnessing a Madigan's failure! It seemed to the third of them that she could never bear to lift her head again and meet a Comstocker's eye and see there that shameful record against thefamily. But she scrambled quickly to her feet when Irene came running in, "The Zingara" all unsung.
Irene's face was white and her eyes glittered. Sissy did not dare meet them, for, to a Madigan, to put a shame in words or looks was to double and triple it. She did not dare to condole; she had no heart to accuse. So she bent down again, ostensibly to tie her shoe, in order to give the furious little Zingara time to recover and to begin to undress. She heard the tambourine's tingling clatter as it was cast to the floor. She looked anywhere but at her sister, but she heard buttons give and buttonholes rend, and bowed her head to the storm.
"I must say," she remarked in a scornfully careless tone when the silence became oppressive, "that Trask plays funny accompaniments." And she lifted her head, fancying herself rather clever in finding a scapegoat.
She ducked immediately, but not in time. One of her own slippers,—oh, the irony of things!—torn off and thrown by Split's impatient hand, struck her in the face.
Sissy's cheek flamed. "Did you do that on purpose, Split Madigan?"
Split Madigan had not done it on purpose, for the reason mainly that it had not occurredto her. But now that it was done, it was not in her present fury against all the world to disclaim intention to insult so small a part of it. Glad of an excuse to outrage some one, any one,—and, even then, preferably Sissy,—to make her sister share some of that hurt and sting and smart that burned within herself, she met Sissy's eye maliciously, triumphantly, significantly.
Sissy gasped. She took the slipper in her hand and made for her enemy. She intended, she believed, to ram her own best Sunday slipper down Split Madigan's throat! And she got quite close before she could have been made to believe that anything on earth or anywhere else could alter her intention. But a little thing did; merely the sound of voices outside the door and a swift, piteous change of expression in that defiant face opposite.
Sissy dropped the slipper and flew to the door. She had a glimpse—which she pretended not to have seen—of the Merry Zingara crumbling in a passion of regretful sobs to the floor. Then she was standing outside, her back to the closed door, a determined, fat little Horatius in purple, with two red cheeks,—one, indeed, redder than the other where the slipper had struck,—vowing to hold the bridgeagainst all comers, so that Split might mourn in peace.
But is she very sick
"'But is sheverysick?'"
"But is sheverysick?" came the eager question.
"Well—pretty sick," said the doctor, gravely.
"Not very?" Sissy's voice fell disappointedly. She opened the door for him and stood at the head of the steps as he prepared cautiously to descend.
"You don't want your sister to be dangerously ill, do you?" Dr. Murchison demanded sharply, turning upon her.
"N-no," said Sissy.
"Well, see that you don't squabble with her. Your aunt ought to have sent for me five days ago, instead of which she lets a sick, nervous, half-crazy child dance and sing on the stage. All poppycock!"
"Can I help you down the first step, doctor?" asked Sissy, gratefully.
She was so thankful for his words. No one—not even a Madigan, accustomed to be held strictly accountable—could be to blame for a failure if she had been ill at the time. The family was almost rehabilitated, it seemed to Sissy.
The doctor's dim old eyes looked curiously at her. "I believe you've got some deviltry in your head, Sissy. Now, you mind me and let your sister alone. There! I'm all right now. I can go all right the rest of the way when I'm once started down your infernal stairs. I ought to charge your father double rates for risking my old bones on them. Yes, it's all right now. It's only the first step that bothers me. It's always the first step that costs—eh, Sissy?"
She looked blankly up at him.
He bent down and patted her head. "See here," he said, "I'll bet you've got more sense than you want us to believe."
Sissy blushed. It was a tardy tribute, she felt, but as welcome as it was deserved.
"With a lot of common sense and a physique like yours, you ought to make a good nurse. Take care of your sister," he added almost appealingly, divided between his knowledge of how poor a nurse Miss Madigan was and how impossible it was to tell this to her niece. "She'll be cross and irritable and—even worse than usual," he said, with a grim smile that recognized the battle-ground upon which the Madigans spent their lives; and this recognition made him seem more human to themthan any other adult. "But you just treat her like a teething baby. She's got a hard row to hoe, that poor, bad Split. She must sleep, and you understand her—Lord! Lord! the care these queer little devils need!" he muttered, shaking his shoulders as he went on down the steps, as though physically to throw off responsibility.
Sissy turned and went back into the house. It was a queer house, she thought. To her alert impressibility, the sickness and apprehension it inclosed were something tangible. She could taste the odors of the sick-room. She could feel the weight of the odd stillness that filled it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a playmate or a fighting-mate—it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision of pretty young death—herself in white and the mysterious glamour of the silent sleep. Poor Sissy, who had never been ill!
Split, with shorn head and with wide-openeyes and hard, flushed cheeks, lay tossing on the big bed in the room off the parlor, which had seldom been used since Frances was born there. "Mother's bed" the Madigans always called it, and they crept into it when ailing, as though it still held something of the old curative magic for childish aches, though all but Kate had forgotten the mother's face as it was before she lay down there the last time. Split had a big hot silver dollar in one hand,—Francis Madigan's way of recognizing and sympathizing with a child's illness,—and in the other an undivided orange, evidence enough of an extraordinary occasion in the Madigan household. But she was not waking. She was not sleeping. She was not dreaming. She knew that Sissy had come in and had squatted on the floor with Bep and Fom, playing dolls, probably. Yet she felt that numb, gradual, terrifying enlargement of her fingertips, of her limbs, of her tongue, her body, her head, that she had been told again and again was mere fancy. With a self-control that was unlike her, an unnatural product of her unnatural state, she locked her jaws together that she might not scream this once. And in the eery stillness that followed the effort, which had made her ears buzz and her temples throb,she heard quite sanely Florence's denial of some charge her twin had brought against her.
"I didn't do any such thing," she whispered.
"You did," said Bep.
"I didn't."
"Cross your heart to die?"
The scream burst from Irene then—not the cry of delirium, but a sharp, terrified, if inarticulate, call for help. If there was one thing Split did respect, it was that Reaper whose name she could never hear without a quick indrawn breath. Yet—in her heart—she knew that, though others might fall at the touch of that fearful scythe, she, Split Madigan, as fleet of limb as a coyote and as sound of heart as a young pine-cone, could never, never die; that the world could never be when her quick red blood should be quiet and her mountain-bred lungs should be stilled.
With a bound Sissy pushed the twins out of the door. She was at the bedside when Miss Madigan entered.
"Go outside, Sissy!" she commanded. "Can't you see you're exciting her? Isn't it hard enough for me to take care of her when she's so cross? She's not to be excited. She's to be kept quiet. There, there, Irene—it's only fancy, I tell you! Look at your fingers; they're thinner, littler than they ever were. Look at Sissy's; see how much bigger they are."
Irene lifted her fingers that had caught Sissy's. She looked from her own fevered hand to Sissy's dimpled one and was comforted. But her hold on her old enemy did not relax. She had something tangible now to reassure her; something that spoke to her in her own language. Her eyes closed, her tense little hand dropped wearily, but she held Sissy fast.
When she thought her patient was asleep, Miss Madigan tried to open her fingers, but, with something of her old waywardness, Irene resisted. And Sissy, with an old-fashioned nod of advice, motioned her aunt to let things be. She curled herself up on a corner of the bed, and—it being quite safe, no other Madigan being present but this unnatural one lying prone, half conscious, half dazed—she put her other hand over the one that held hers, and sat there quietly waiting.
The minutes came to seem like hours, but Sissy sat motionless and Miss Madigan left the room. Presently an eery humming came from Split's lips. Then, mechanically, Sissy's fingers picked out on the spread the simple little melody Split sang as in a dream.
"Play it," the sick girl whispered, pushing away the hand she had held.
Sissy jumped as though she had been discovered indulging in gross and inexcusable sentimentality. She looked down at Split with a puzzled, sheepish smile, wondering how long it had been since her sister had come into the real world out of that fantastic one where marvelous things might happen.
"Play it!" repeated Split, fretfully.
Sissy rose and walked softly into the front room. She fancied if she took a long time, yet appeared about to obey, Split would forget her desire and, left alone in the silence, would fall asleep. She opened the piano softly and pulled out the stool. Then leisurely she pretended to arrange the light and the piano-cover.
Split, quieted by her apparent compliance, lay back with a sigh of content. Her mind, whose very apprehension of the delirium had excluded other thoughts, dwelt now restfully upon the combination of easy mental effort and soothing melody her "piece" meant to her. Besides, she was ordering her junior about, using her illness as a club to beat down remonstrance. Split was really on the way to being herself again.
After a bit she found that she was almost dozing off, and waked with an indignant start to see Sissy stealing softly out of the room.
"Where are you going?" she demanded. "Why don't you play it when I tell you to?"
For an instant Sissy rebelled. Then she looked at the passionate little figure sitting tensely upright, at the white fever-circle about the dry lips, at the short hair and the unnaturally bright, angry eyes. She went back to the piano, sat down, and with her foot on the soft pedal, that Aunt Anne might not hear, she began to play.
The melody was simple and light, with a little break in its sweetness. Sissy's touch was childlike, but her impressionable temperament, quickened by the strangeness of that dark room behind her, overflowed into the melody her fingers brought out. The accompanying bass was rhythmic, and the nervous, fevered child found mental and physical occupation in letting the fingers of her left hand pick out its detail upon the pillow which she had lately thrown in a passion against the wall because it had been so hot and she so miserably uncomfortable.
Sissy had begun the second part, the changing bass of which had been poor Split'spons 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.
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 hadshe 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'tyou 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 billto 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, seizingthe 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 accomplishedlady, 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, andyet 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 Idon'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 chinacup 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, andyou're not butter-fingered,"—with an insulting glance at Bep,—"you can manage all right."