"Old Mother Gibson, why do you—"
"Old Mother Gibson, why do you—"
she began her singsong. "No, no! Wait. I know another. 'T ain't fair," she stammered in a prose parenthesis.
"Old Mother Gibson had a—
"Old Mother Gibson had a—
"Stop laughing, now; wait a minute. You don't give me a chance, Sissy. You play faster for me than for anybody else! You do it a-purpose, too, just 'cause you know it's easy to bluster me.
"Old Moth-er—Gib-son—"
"Old Moth-er—Gib-son—"
Bep stopped suddenly, for through the glass doors came the subject of her lay. He had a finger to his lips as he glanced at Sissy's back—a hint that the rest of the company seized delightedly. And when the music began again, he was not ashamed to make this contribution:
"Old Mother Gibson, take pity on a cousinLeft to the tender mercies of the other half-dozen!"
"Old Mother Gibson, take pity on a cousinLeft to the tender mercies of the other half-dozen!"
At first the accompanist, accustomed to the rodomontade of voice as well as gesture of the excited performers, was not aware of the interloper. When she finally spun around and saw the savior singing in the midst of his libelers, she let him finish the couplet unaccompanied, and sat, a fat, shocked statue glued to the piano-stool, staring at him.
It was absurd of him, but there was something in Old Mother Gibson, as the Madigans sang and played her, that turned the soberest of heads. And the savior's forte was not in being staid. He fell upon his knee before her.
"Forgive me, O Sissy, for not being a Madigan," he begged, "and receive me into the fold!"
She looked down at him, self-conscious, embarrassed; yet the hidden sentimentality of her nature was appealed to by the masculine young face turned half laughing, half seriously, to her.
"Are you sure," she asked shyly, "that you're not one already?"
It is of record that one evening during that summer when the old Tomboy mine was reopened, a young Irishman newly arrived on the Comstock escorted down to Fitzmeier's—where, everybody knows, there is ice-cream to be had—six girls of assorted ages, one boy, and two young persons whose garments belied their sex. Yet they all seemed rampantly happy and quite unashamed.