Chapter III: Part 3

On the top floor Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair lived with her husband and an only daughter. Mrs. Clair was an elegant matron, quite new, a small blonde who could turn her head. Florence's skilful fingers kept this lady most beautifully gowned. And Split--whose favorite of the small-fry dolls she had once been--still remembered her fondly, and passed over to Fom the most wonderful patches. These she got from Jack Cody, the washerwoman's son, who bribed his mother by promises of good conduct to beg samples of their gowns from her aristocratic patrons.

Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair was an unfortunate gentleman, tall, low-spirited, loose-jointed, with fixed blue eyes and knobby black hair. His melancholy, Bep was assured, was due to two things--the superiority of his wife in the matter of a movable head, and the impossibility of ever getting a pair of trousers that would come near to him in the seat and stay away from him at the ankle. Fom's theory--a hypothesis that enraged Bep--was that Mrs. Guy St. Gerald was the wealthy member of the family, and that her husband basely envied her her good fortune. She had a way, had Fom, of carrying on imaginary conversations with Mr. Clair upholding this idea, which made her twin long to rend her, and the doll too, limb from limb.

"Ah, Mr. Clair! Yes, thank you. Mrs. Clair not in?... I'm sorry. Gone off to Newport, has she, to sell her marble palace? What about the one on Fifth Avenue?... You don't say! Making it bigger? Well, well! And made a million in stocks, too. How delightful! You wish that you had some money--yes, I suppose--"

"He does not! He does not!" The interruption came fiercely from Bep. "You talk to your own doll and leave mine alone."

"Pouf! If you're afraid he'll tell me how poor he is--"

"He ain't poor."

"What does he wear such trousers for, then? Tell me that!"

Bep looked unutterable things at her twin. "Just you make men's clothes for a while, Fom Madigan, and see how 't is yourself!" she cried.

"Put Mrs. Clair in men's clothes?" demanded Fom, purposely misunderstanding. "I'd like to see myself! The very richest lady in New York in men's clothes--why, you could get arrested for that!"

"I'll change--" began Bep, quickly.

"No, thank you. You couldn't suit Mrs. Clair. She's that particular about her things!"

"Well, just the same, I won't make men's clothes any more." Bep rolled her head threateningly.

"Going to let Mr. Clair go naked?" inquired Fom, pleasantly. "He'll have to be sent to the poorhouse, then."

"He sha'n't! He'll go to bed sick first, and then Mrs. Clair'll just have to stay home in an old wrapper and nurse him."

"No; she'll take Anita and go off to the country.... Are you so sick, Mr. Clair?" began Fom, while her slower twin danced with apprehension of the outcome of this one-sided dialogue. "I'm awful sorry. Smallpox? Oh, how dreadful! And that's why Mrs. Clair and Anita have gone--"

"'T ain't! 'T ain't smallpox! 'T ain't! 'T ain't! 'T ain't!" Bep hopped about on one foot in her excitement.

"How do you know?" asked Fom, calmly. "Are you the doctor?"

The doctor lived in the flat below. He was a ready-dressed gentleman, still stylish if a bit seedy, and his large family overflowed down into the next two shelves. He was summoned.

"I have called you, doctor,"--began Fom.

"I've sent for you, doctor,"--interrupted Bep.

"Well!" exclaimed Fom, stiffly, "I think you might be polite enough to let Mrs. Clair speak to the doctor about her own husband."

"What's she going to say?" demanded Bep.

"How should I know?" asked Fom, airily; and then, hurrying on, while she made Mrs. Clair bow low before the ready-made physician, "I am Mrs. Clair, doctor, the rich Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair who has all the money--"

"It's no such thing! It's no such thing!" shrieked Bep.

"Well, Miss Florence Madigan!" exclaimed Mrs. Clair by proxy, "if your sister Bessie ain't the rudest!"

"I'll smash her if she says that again!" came in a bellow from Bep.

"You touch my doll!" Daringly Fom placed Mrs. Clair within tempting distance of Bep's hand.

"Well--just you let her say it again!"

"I don't need to. She's told me, so now I know it."

"You may go down-stairs again, doctor. It's a mistake," said Bep, addressing the medical man. (The twins always tried to keep up appearances before their dolls.) "Mr. Clair--the awfully rich Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair--is not sick at all. But you can send your bill to him anyway, he won't care. It must have been some poor relation of Mrs. Clair's--she didn't have a dress to her name before she married, you know."

"Oh--oh! Bessie Madigan!"

"Well, she didn't," said Bep, stoutly.

"I'll bet you--I'll bet you a shut-up. There!" Cautious Fom rarely hazarded so great a stake; but she felt that the occasion demanded something adequate.

"All right; I'll leave it to Sissy." It was from Sissy that Bep had inherited Mr. Clair. She would know.

Laying down stiff all-china Anita Clair, whose shoes she was painting red to match her sash, Bep followed her twin into the house.

But the omnivorous Sissy was reading "The Boys of England"--a thing Sissy loved to do; for it was a magazine not permitted to enter Mrs. Pemberton's immaculate house, a recommendation in itself, and, besides, Split, to whom Jack Cody had loaned it, was doubtless looking all over for it at this very moment. Lying luxuriously flat upon the floor and eating chocolate, Sissy had just got to that part where Jack Harkaway "with one flash of Abu Hadji's ruby-incrusted simitar decapitated the unfortunate Arab, and Dick Lightheart, seizing the bewitching Haidee, had mounted his horse"--when the belligerent twins found her.

"Now, let me say it," began Fom.

"No; you won't ask it fair.... Sissy, tell me, wasn't Mr.--"

"Tra--la--la--la!" sang Fom, shrilly, drowning Bep's voice.

"Say!" Sissy looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could not. At eleven she shivered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a tragedy in the mine--whose tall chimneys she could see from her window--was as intangibly distant and irrelevant as weekly statistics of the superintendent's mining reports.

Her juniors harkened respectfully; but neither would permit the other to ask the question, for fear of its revealing the nature of the answer hoped for. So they withdrew for a period, returning with the following query, which Bep allowed Fom to put, so sure was she of the response:

"Did or did not Mrs. Clair ever have a dress before she married Mr. Clair?"

To this the oracle gave answer:

She did not, for how could she, she being Mr. Clair's second wife; his first, an accomplished lady, but all-solid china, having fallen from the top story of the apartment-house and smashed herself into bits, and the widower having himself accompanied Sissy and Split to the shop to select her successor, whose first gown was, of course, a heavy mourning robe.

Bep heaved a deep sigh of content. She ran back to the woodshed so relieved that, although she had won a valuable shut-up, she did not care to "trophy" in her victory. Fom followed. But her grief for Mrs. Clair was bitterer even than her own disappointment.

"I want the Smith twins," she said stiffly, when they got back to the dolls' sky-scraper. And Bep understood.

The Smith twins were an invention of technical Fom's that had become an institution with herself and her playmate. Two tiny china dolls dressed in baby long clothes (the better to hide the fact that they were legless), the one with pink, the other with a blue sash, were brought up from the lowest story, where broken-nosed Mrs. Smith lived with her family of cripples.

They were dolls of bad omen, these two, but following instead of prophesying a storm. When it became absolutely necessary for one Madigan twin to be "mad" at the other, and yet that the business of playing be uninterrupted, the Smith twins invariably made their appearance. They were supposed to save one's dignity; in reality, they lent piquancy to games and rendered "making up" delightful.

Occasionally Bep and Fom did disown each other and adopt a chum from the outside world. One Beulah, known as "Bombey," Forrest was always ready obligingly to serve either or both of them in the capacity of dearest friend. But other playmates were tame after being accustomed to a Madigan; and each twin was so jealously afraid of the other's having a good time without her that she spent most of the period of estrangement trying to spy out what the other and her interloping companion were doing.

The Smith twins were easier.

"Tell Bep," said Florence to the pink-sashed small Smith, "that I think she's a nasty mean thing, and Mrs. Clair'll never forgive her."

"Tell Fom," returned Bep, with spirit, putting the blue-sashed Smith baby in her pocket as a sort of emergency battery, so that the wires of communication might be set up at any time between her twin and herself, "that I don't care a 'article for what she thinks. And Mrs. Clair's nothing but a beggar. I wonder that Mr. Clair married her!"

The war was on.

* * * * *

Down on the dump, that fascinating mountain of soft, glittering waste rock, the godless twins went to dig on Christmas afternoon. The mining operations were elaborate that they projected there, particularly after Jack Cody's brother Peter joined them. While Peter was rigging up windlasses with pieced-out cord, Fom, with a couple of tin cups purloined from Wong's kitchen, brought up the rock, piling it in miniature dumps at the mouth of their shaft. Bep's awkward fingers could be trusted only with the preliminary scooping out of the ground where a new shaft was to be sunk.

"Tell Fom," she said to the blue-sashed Smith twin in her pocket, "that I want the scooper; my hands are all sore."

"Tell Bep," returned Fom, quickly, "that she can't have it till Pete an' I get through running our drift."

The excuse did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart for the "scooper"--a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore by hand.

But Fom was slim, and quick as a cat. She threw herself bodily upon both scooper and pick--the latter an old fork with but one tine left. Bep promptly threw herself on top of her twin, while Peter, a laconic lad, calmly set himself to rehabilitating the hind wheel of a battered tin toy express which served as a dump-cart.

"Little folks shouldn't quarrel," suddenly said a slow voice above the struggling arms and legs of the twins.

Fom looked up, still pressing her body hard against the tools in dispute, while Bep got to her feet, red-faced and panting. "We're not quarreling," said Florence, calmly.

Superintendent Warren Pemberton, still in his oilskins from a trip down the mine, looked down at her and gasped. He did not know the Madigan brunette twin, and actually thought she was lying. But Fom was never known to lie; she only pettifogged.

"You're not quarreling!"

"Nope."

"Didn't I see you with my own eyes?" he demanded, piqued.

"People don't see people quarreling," said Fom, didactically. "They hear them."

"Oh, that's it! Well, didn't I hear--"

"No, you didn't; for we're mad and don't speak to each other."

"But you're not quarreling?"

"Nope," repeated Fom, stoutly, "we're not."

Mr. Pemberton shook his head helplessly. "What are you doing?"

"I'm running a drift"--Fom misunderstood the drift of his question--"from the Silver King to the Diamond Heart, and the earth keeps coming down. Then Bep tries to make it harder by grabbing for the tools and--"

"Why don't you timber?" suggested Pemberton, gravely.

"'Cause I don't have to," answered Fom, quite as seriously.

"Oh, you don't!" Pemberton, a man with no sense of humor, had been unusually expansive; but he shrank angrily into himself now, as though from a cold douche. It took some time for one to get accustomed to Fom's way of instructing authorities upon the subjects which they were supposed to know most about.

"No, that's silly," remarked Fom, superbly. "If the ground's sticky enough, and you're not butter-fingered,"--with an insulting glance at Bep,--"you can manage all right."

"But I'm not butter-fingered and I always timber." Warren Pemberton was a slow man, but a dogged one; the elusiveness of this pert child irritated him.

"That's 'cause you don't know any better," came from the expert, who had returned to her task, the excited flourishes of her uplifted legs betraying its difficulties.

"You're a little fool!" declared the superintendent. "Do you know who I am? My name's Pemberton, and I--"

"Why don't you make your wife leave Crosby alone, then?" demanded Fom, without seeming much impressed.

Warren Pemberton looked down upon her little body with an expression that made Bep wonder why he refrained from stamping upon it.

"You don't think Mrs. Pemberton knows her business, either?" His ruddy, full face looked apoplectic.

"Nope. Sissy says if she was Crosby she'd run away to sea. And she's going to put him up to it, too, if--"

But Bep, frightened by the growing anger in the great man's face, interposed. "Shall I shut her up for you, Mr. Pemberton?" she asked.

"What--what d' ye say? I wish to God you would, or that somebody could!"

"Fom," said Bep, authoritatively, "shut up!"

Fom jumped to her feet. There was appeal, wrath, rebellion in her crimson face. She opened her lips as if to protest.

"Shut up, Fom," repeated Bep, distinctly. "I said _shut up_."

There came a deadly silence. Pemberton, in the act of stalking ill-temperedly away, turned bewildered to regard the miracle.

"Say," asked Peter Cody, driven to speech by curiosity. "Say, Fom, do you let your sister boss you like that? I thought you was twins."

Fom looked appealingly at Bep. If Bep would but explain the nature of a shut-up--its power of suddenly depriving one of speech; of making one temporarily dumb in the very midst of a sentence, at the bidding of the winner of a wager, whenever, wherever the caprice to collect the debt of honor occurred to her!

But Bep, after accompanying Mr. Pemberton a few steps, striving to untell him what Fom had betrayed, turned her attention again to mining matters. She knew well what Fom's eyes begged, but hid her head in the Silver King, whence a subterranean giggle came, revealing her enjoyment of the situation.

Fom's stormy eyes filled and the Silver King and the Diamond Heart jigged back and forth till the tears splashed down and cleared her vision.

"Ho--cry-baby!" called Peter Cody. Peter was one of those gallant gentlemen who are never afraid of a playmate when some one else has demonstrated that he can be downed.

At the taunt, a revengeful passion seized Fom, standing there--a lingual Samson shorn of her tongue, two dirty channels plowed down her cheeks by her tears. Deliberately lifting her foot, she brought it down, stamping with all her might again and again.

The soft, loosely packed earth slid smoothly down. The Diamond Heart caved in completely, the almost finished connecting tunnel was a wreck, and the still rolling, moist gravel swept over Bep's head, filling up the Silver King clear to the surface.

By the time Peter had realized their utter ruin, and Bep had shaken the particles of sand and gravel from her hair and ears and throat, Fom was nowhere in sight.

"Let's kill her," suggested Bep.

"Shall we?" asked Peter, with an air of stern justice.

They debated the question, fully realizing the make-believe of it, yet taking pleasure in at least the mention of revenge.

Suddenly Bep gave a cry of triumph and picked up something from the ground.

"What is it?" asked Peter.

"It's Fom's doll. It must have dropped out of her pocket when she was digging and sassing Mr. Pemberton. We'll play there's been an accident,--a cave in the mine,--and the doll'll be buried alive down there. Wouldn't Fom howl?"

She rolled up her sleeve and thrust a round arm far down in the clean, moist gravel, leaving the poor Smith twin in the murderous depths of the Silver King. Then both set to work. Poor Fom, half-way down the dump, beside the mysterious "flush" of seething, boiling, foaming waste water, whose tide went low or high with the breathing of the great mine, heard a laugh or a whistle now and then; and a miserable feeling of loneliness oppressed her. But she lay there sobbing quietly, while on top the valiant rescuers emptied the mines, carried on conversations with the entombed men, and at last, with a fine pretense of amazement and grief, discovered the dead miner. Reverently he was borne to the surface, Bep holding the bucket steady while Peter wound the cord. And then they buried the unfortunate man. There was an imposing funeral, and the three-wheeled dump-cart was filled with imaginary mourners. At the grave hymns were sung by Bep, when she could be spared from mourner's duties, and a prayer by Peter concluded the impressive services.

It had been Fom's intention to lie there half-way down the dump till she died of hunger--when Bep would be sorry for her cruel treatment. The self-pitying tears were in Florence's eyes as she thought out the details of Bep's grief, and the unanimous reprobation of the family for the bad blonde twin. But she grew hungrier and hungrier, and at last resolved to go home to lunch.

First, though, she would see how much damage she had done in her short-lived anger, for her heart was sore when she thought how proud they two had been of their mines. She scrambled to the top. There was the new shaft, the Tomboy, almost completed. The Diamond Heart was in working order. Peter's dexterous fingers had triumphed over the shifting rock, and he had modestly taken a hint as to timbering from Warren Pemberton. The tunnel was an accomplished fact, while over the frail hoisting-works of the Silver King a tiny flag--a corner torn from Bep's handkerchief--fluttered at half-mast.

THE ANCESTRY OF IRENE

In her heart Irene was confident that, though among the Madigans, she was not of them. The color of her hair, the shape of her nose, the tempestuousness of her disposition, the difficulty she experienced in fitting her restless and encroaching nature into what was merely one of a number of jealously frontiered interstices in a large family--all this forbade tame acceptance on her part of so ordinary and humble an origin as Francis Madigan's fatherhood connoted.

"No," she said firmly to herself the day she and Florence were see-sawing in front of the woodshed after school, "he's only just my foster-father; that's all."

How this foster-father--she loved the term, it sounded so delightfully haughty--had obtained possession of one whose birthright would place her in a station so far above his own, she had not decided. But she was convinced that, although poor and peculiar and incapable of comprehending the temperament and necessities of the nobly born, he was, in his limited way, a worthy fellow. And she had long ago resolved that when her real father came for her, she would bend graciously and forgivingly down from her seat in the carriage, to say good-by to poor old Madigan.

"Thank you very, very much, Mr. Madigan," she would sweetly say, "for all your care. My father, the Count, will never forget what you have done for his only child. As for myself, I promise you that I will have an eye upon your little girls. I am sure his Grace the Duke will gladly do anything for them that I recommend. I am very much interested in little Florence, and shall certainly come for her some day in my golden chariot to take her to my castle for a visit, because she is such a well-behaved child and knew me, in her childish way, for a noble lady in disguise. Cecilia? Which one is that? Oh, the one her sisters call Sissy! She needs disciplining sadly, Mr. Madigan, sadly. Much as he loves me, my father, the Prince, would not care to have me know her--as she is now. But she will improve, if you will be very, very strict with her. Good-by! Good-by, all! No, I shall not forget you. Be good and obey your aunty. Good-by!"

The milk-white steeds would fly down the steep, narrow, unpaved streets. On each side would stand the miners, bowing, hat in hand, hurrahing for the great Emperor and his beautiful daughter--she who had so strangely lived among them under the name of Split Madigan. They would speak, realizing now, of certain royal traits they had always noted in her--her haughty spirit that never brooked an insult, her independence, her utter fearlessness, the reckless bravery of a long line of kings, and--and even that very disinclination for study which they had stupidly fancied indicated that Sissy Madigan was her superior! What would Princess Irene want with vulgar fractions, a common denominator, and such low subjects?

"What makes you wrinkle up your nose that way, Split?" Florence's voice broke in complainingly on her sister's reverie. She glanced up the incline of the see-saw to the height whence Irene looked down, physically as well as socially, upon her faithful retainer and the straggling little town.

Irene did not answer. She was busy dreaming, and her dreams were of the turned-up-nose variety.

"Don't, Split! It makes you look like a--what Sissy just now called you." The smaller sister's eyes fell, as though seeking corroboration from the middle of the board, where Sissy had been so lately acting as "candle-stick"--lately, for the incident had ended (no game being enticing enough to hold these two long in an unnatural state of neutrality) in Split's washing Sissy's face vigorously in the snow, and Sissy's calling her elder sister "nothing but an old Indian!" as she ran weeping into the house with the familiar parting threat to get even before bedtime. No Madigan could bear that the sun should set on her wrath; she preferred that all scores should be paid off, so that the slate might be clean for to-morrow's reckonings.

"Fom," said her big sister, slowly, when she was quite ready to speak, "I think you'd better call me 'Irene.' You'd feel gladder about it when I'm gone."

"Where?" At this minute it was Fom's turn to be dangerously high, and she wriggled to the uttermost end of the plank to counterbalance her sister's weight.

A mysterious smile overspread Irene's face. It became broadly triumphant as she rose presently on the short end of the board, her arms daringly outspread, her toes upturned in front of her, her agile body well balanced, her spirit exulting in the sense of danger without and superiority within.

"When?" asked Florence, with that amiable readiness to consider a question unasked, so becoming to the vassal. "When are you going?"

"To-night--maybe." Her own words startled Irene. She loved to play upon Fom's fears, but she had not really intended committing herself so far. "He may call for me to-night," she added, with qualifying emphasis.

"Who? Not--not--"

"Yes, my father. I must be ready at any time, you know."

Fom looked alarmed. She had heard long ago and in strict confidence about Split's lofty parentage. She had even accepted drafts upon her future, rendering services which were unusual in a Madigan fag, with the understanding that when the Princess Split should come into her own, she would richly repay. But she had never before heard her speak so positively or set a time when their relationship must cease.

A feeling of utter loneliness came over Split's faithful ally. She saw the balance of power in the Madigan oligarchy rudely disturbed. She beheld, in a swift, dread vision, the undisputed supremacy of the party of Sissy. Dismay entered her soul and shook her body, for with the brunette of the twins emotion and action were synonymous. "Oh, don't go, Split!" she begged, squirming unhappily at her end of the plank. "Don't go!"

High up in the air, Split smiled superbly. There was _noblesse oblige_ in that smile; also the strong teasing tincture which no Madigan could resist using, even upon her closest ally.

"Oh, Split--o-o-oh, Split!" wailed Fom, forgetting in her wriggling misery how close she already was to the end of the plank.

A crash and a bump and a squeal told it to her all at once. She had slid clear off, getting an instantaneous effect of her haughty sister unsupported at a dizzy eminence, before Split came bumping down to earth, the see-saw giving that regal head a parting, stunning tap as the long end finally settled down and the short one went up to stay.

It was never in the ethics of Madigan warfare to explain the inexplicable. Florence was on her feet, flying as though for her very life, before Split, shaken down from her dreams, quite realized what had happened. And she was still sitting as she had fallen when Jim, the Indian, came for the sawbuck.

Jim limped, his eyes were sore and watery, and it took him two weeks to conquer the Madigan woodpile, which any other Piute in town could have leveled in half the time.

"Him fall, eh?" he asked, dismantling the see-saw with that careful leisureliness that accounted for the Chinaman Wong's contempt for Indians.

"Not him; _her_, Jim."

Split possessed a passion for imparting knowledge, of which she had little, and which was hard for her to attain.

Jim grinned.

"She no got little gal like you teach her Inglis," he said, gently apologetic.

"Not she, Jim; _he_. How old is your little girl?" Split remembered that a genteel interest in the lower classes is becoming to the well-born.

"He just big like you," Jim responded mournfully, drawing the back of his brown hand across his nose. "But he all gone."

"Dead?" Split crossed her legs uneasily as she squatted, and lowered her voice reverently.

"He no dead," Jim said, lifting the sawbuck and easing it on his shoulder. "One Washoe squaw steal him--little papoose, nice little papoose. Much white--like you, missy. So white, squaw say no sure Injun."

"Jim!"

"Take him down Tluckee valley. Take him 'way. Jim see squaw one day long time 'go--Washoe Lake--shoot ducks. Heap shoot squaw. He die, but he say white Faginia man got papoose."

"Jim!" It was the faintest echo of the first terrified exclamation.

"Come Faginia, look papoose. No find. Chop wood long time. Heap hogady--not much dinner. Nice papoose--white, like you."

Jim paused. He expected sympathy, but he hoped for dinner. When he saw he was to get neither, he hunched his lame hip; scratched his head, balanced the sawbuck, and shuffled away.

Too overcome to move, Split sat looking after him. Her father! This, then, was her father! She was dazed, helpless, too overwhelmed even to be unhappy yet.

There came a shrill call for her from Kate, and Split, with unaccustomed meekness, staggered obediently to her feet. What was left for her but to be a slave, she said stonily to herself. She was an Indian like--like her father! And Sissy had noticed the resemblance that very afternoon!

"It's the bell, Split," explained Kate, who was reading "The Spanish Gypsy" in the low, hall-like library.

She had begun to read the book for the reason that no one in her class at school had read it--usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finishing it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her, till she should know the end.

"Shall I go?" asked Split, humbly, looking up at her sister.

Kate looked up, too surprised by her sister's docility to do anything but nod. She had anticipated a battle, a ring at the door-bell being the signal for a flying wedge of Madigans tearing through the hall, with inquisitive Irene at its apex--except when she was asked to answer it.

The sisters' eyes met: those of the elder, in her thin, dark, flushed face, hazy with romantic happiness; those of the younger bright with romantic suffering, demanding a share of that felicity which transfigured her senior.

"What're you reading, anyway, Kate?" she asked.

As well tap the bung of a cask and ask what it holds. Kate began chanting:

"'Father, your child is ready! She will not
Forsake her kindred: she will brave all scorn
Sooner than scorn herself. Let Spaniards all,
Christians, Jews, Moors, shoot out the lip and say,
"Lo, the first hero in a tribe of thieves!"
Is it not written so of them? They, too,
Were slaves, lost, wandering, sunk beneath a curse,
Till Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were born,
Till beings lonely in their greatness lived,
And lived to save their people.'"

It poured from Kate's lips, the story of the lady Fedalma and her Gipsy father, a stream of winy romance, a sugared impossibility preserved in the very spirits of poetry.

Again the old bell jangled, and again. Kate was glutted, drunk with the sound of the verbal music that had been chorusing behind her lips; while for Irene every word seemed charged with the significance of special revelation. The light seemed to leap from her sister's eyes to kindle a conflagration in her own.

"Read it again--that part--Kate! Read it!" she cried.

And Kate, not a bit loath, turned the page and repeated:

"'Lay the young eagle in what nest you will,
The cry and swoop of eagles overhead
Vibrate prophetic in its kindred frame,
And make it spread its wings and poise itself
For the eagle's flight.'"

Split breathed again, a full, deep breath of satisfaction. An Indian--she, Split Madigan? Perhaps; but an Indian princess, then, with a mission as great, glorious, and impossible as Fedalma's own.

When at last she did turn mechanically to answer the bell, she saw that Sissy had anticipated her and was showing old Professor Trask into the parlor. Ordinarily Irene loved to listen at the door while Sissy's lesson was in progress; for Trask was a nervous, disappointed wreck, whose idea of teaching music seemed to be to make his pupils as much like himself as harried youth can be like worried age. But on this great day the joy of hearing the perfect Sissy rated had not the smallest place in her enemy's thoughts. A poet's words had lifted Irene in an instant from child hell to heaven, had fired her imagination, had rekindled her pride, had given back her dreams.

Reality was not altogether so pleasant, she found, when she went into the kitchen, skirmished with the Chinese cook for Jim's dinner, and went out to the woodpile to give it to him herself.

She did not wait to see him eat it--she was not poet enough for that; and, that impersonal, composite father, her tribe, was calling her.

Pulling on her hood and jacket, with her mittens dangling from a red tape on each side, she flew out and down the long, rickety stairs which a former senator from Nevada had built up the mountain's side, when he planned for his home a magnificent view of the mountains and desert off toward the east.

Split did not look at either, though they shone, the one like a billowy moonlit sea, the other like a lake of silver, because of the snow that covered them. She half ran, half slid down the hilly street till she came to a box-like miner's cabin, where Jane Cody, the washerwoman, lived with her son. In front of it she halted and called imperiously:

"Jack!"

For this same Jack was her own, her discovery, her possession, who acknowledged her thrall and was proud of it.

But the green shutters over the one window remained fast, and the door tight closed.

"Jack?" There was a suggestion of incredulity in Split's voice.

The whistles burst forth in a medley of throaty roars (it was five-o'clock "mining-time"), but the bird-like whistle of Jack was missing.

"Jack Cody!" Split stamped her high arctics in the snow.

The door was opened a little, and a round black head was cautiously thrust forth.

"I want you--come!" the Indian princess announced. "And get your sled."

"I can't," replied the head.

"But I want you."

The head wagged dolefully.

"Why not?"

The head hung down.

"Tell me."

The head's negative was sorrowful but determined.

"If you don't tell me I'll--never speak to you again 's long as I live, Jack Cody!"

The head stretched out its long neck and sent an agonized glance toward her.

"Tell me--right now!" she commanded.

"Well--she's took my clothes with her," wailed the head, and jerked itself within, while the door was slammed behind it.

Split walked up the stoop.

"Jack," she called, her mouth at the keyhole, "who took 'em? Your mother? Why? But she can't keep you in that way. Never mind. What _have_ you got on?"

The door was opened an inch or two, and the head started to look out. But at sight of Split so near it withdrew in such turtle-like alarm that she laughed aloud.

"What're you laughing at?" growled the boy.

"What's that you got on?" said she.

"My--my mother's wrapper."

A peal of laughter burst from the Indian princess. But it ceased suddenly. For the door was thrown open with such violence that it made Jane Cody's wax flowers shake apprehensively under their glass bell, and a figure stalked out such as might haunt a dream--long, gaunt, awkward, inescapably boyish, yet absurdly feminine, now that the dark calico wrapper flapped at its big, awkward heels and bound and hindered its long legs.

Split looked from the heavily shod feet to the round, short-shaven black head, and a premonitory giggle shook her.

"Don't you laugh--don't you dare laugh at me! Don't you, Split--will you?" The phrases burst from him, a threat at the beginning, an appeal at the end.

"No," said Split, choking a bit; "no, I won't. You don't look very--" she gulped--"very funny, Jack. And it's getting so dark that nobody'd know--really they wouldn't."

"Sure?"

Split nodded.

"Get your sled quick, the big, long one, the leg-breaker, and take me down--I'll tell you where. Get it, won't you?"

"In this, this--like this?" Jack faltered.

"It's so important, Jack. Please! It's always you that asks me, remember."

The boy threw his hands out with a gesture that strained the narrow garment he wore almost to bursting. He began to talk, to argue, to plead; then suddenly he yielded, and turned and ran, a grotesque, long-legged shape, toward the back of the house.

When he whistled, Split joined him, and together they plowed their way through the high snow to the beaten-down street beyond. At the top of the hill, Split sat down well to the front of the low, rakish-looking leg-breaker. Behind her the boy, hitching up his skirts, threw himself with one knee bent beneath him, and, with a skilful ruddering of the other long, untrousered leg, started the sled.

They had coasted only half a block--Virginia City runs downhill--when they heard the shrill yelp of the Comstock boy on the trail of his prey. As Jack stopped the sled a swift volley of snowballs from a cross-street struck the figure of a tall, timid, stooping man in an old-fashioned cape, such as no Comstock boy had ever seen on anything masculine.

"It's Professor Trask," breathed Irene, keen delight in persecution lending to her aggressive, bright face that savage sharpness of feature which Sissy Madigan called Indian. "Don't you wish you hadn't got that dress on, Jack?" she asked, as the tall, black mark for a good shot still stood hesitating to cross the polished, steep street, down which many sleds had slipped for days past. "You could get him every time, couldn't you?"

Despite the ignoble garment that cramped it, the boy's breast swelled with pride in his lady's approval.

"You could just fire one at him from here, anyway," suggested Irene, adaptable as her sex is to contemporary standards and customs.

"Ye-es," said the boy, hesitating; "but he's such a poor old luny."

Split turned her imperial little hooded head questioningly.

"He is--really luny," said the boy, apologetically. "Since his little girl wandered away one day from home and never came back, he gets spells, you know. He was telling ma one day when she went over to do his washing. But--but I will land one on him if you want, Split."

But Split had suddenly pivoted clear around and sat now facing him, an eager, mittened hand staying his hard, skilful, obedient fingers, already making the snowball.

"How--how old would that little girl be, Jack?" she gasped.

"Why, 'bout twelve--thirteen. Why?"

"And what would be the color of her hair?"

"Red, I s'pose, like his; not--not like yours--Split," he added shyly, glancing at the brown fire of the curls that escaped from her hood.

But Irene was no longer listening. She was looking over to the other side of the street, where that shrinking, pitiable old figure in its threadbare neatness trembled; not daring to seek safety across the dangerously smooth street, nor daring to remain exposed here, where it ducked ridiculously every now and then to avoid the whizzing balls that sang about it.

Irene breathed hard. A coward for a father, a scarecrow, a butt for a gang of miners' boys! This, this was her father! Why, even crippled old Jim, the wood-chopper, seen in retrospect and haloed by copper-colored dreams of romantic rehabilitation--even Jim seemed regrettable.

But she did not hesitate, any more than Fedalma did. She, too, knew a daughter's duty--to a hitherto unknown, just-discovered father. A merely ordinary, every-day parent like Francis Madigan was, as a matter of course, the common enemy, and no self-respecting Madigan would waste the poetry of filial feeling upon any one so realistic.

"You wait for me here, Jack," she said, with unhesitating reliance upon his obedience.

"Where're you going? I thought you were in a hurry to get down to the wickiups."

She did not hear him. She had spun off the sled, and with the sure-footed speed of the hill-child she was crossing the street.

Old Trask, his short-sighted eyes blinking beneath his twitching, bushy red eyebrows, looked down as upon a miracle when a red-mittened hand caught his and he heard a confident voice--the clear voice children use to enlighten the stupidity of adults:

"I'll help you across; take my hand."

"Eh--what?"

He leaned down, failing to recognize her. Children had no identity to him. They were merely brats, he used to say, unless they happened to have some musical aptitude. But he accepted her aid, his battered old hat rocking excitedly upon his high bony forehead, as he ducked and turned and shivered at the oncoming balls. "Bad boys--bad boys!" he ejaculated. "Boys are the devil!"

"Yes," agreed Split, craftily. "Girls are best. Your little girl, now--father--" she began softly.

"Eh--what?" he exclaimed. "Who's your father? My respects to him."

"I have no father," she answered softly. A plan had sprung full-born from her quick brain. She would win this erratic father back to memory of his former life and her place in it--somewhat as did one Lucy Manette, a favorite heroine of Split's that Sissy had read about and told her of. That would be a fine thing to do--almost as fine, and requiring the center of the stage as much, as rehabilitating the Red Man.

"I have no father," she murmured, "if you won't be mine."

"What? What? No!" Trask was across now and brushing the snowy traces of battle from his queer old cape. "No; I don't want any children. I had one once--a daughter."

Split's heart beat fast.

"She was a brat, with the temper of a little fiend, and no ear--absolutely none--for music; played like an elephant."

How terribly confirmatory!

"And what--what became of her?" whispered Split.

"She ran away two years ago and--"

"Two years!"

"I said two, didn't I?" demanded the old professor, irascibly.

Disgusted, Split turned her back on him. Why, two years ago Sissy had first called her an Indian; how right she had been! Two years ago she, Split, was making over all her dolls to Fom. Two years ago she had already discovered Jack Cody's fleet strength, his wonderful aptness at making swift sleds, in which her reckless spirit reveled, his mastership of other boys of his gang, and--her mastery of him.

She turned and beckoned to him. His sweet whistle rang out in answer like a vocal salute, and in a moment she was seated again in front of him, with that deft, tail-like left leg of his steering them down, down over cross-street, through teams and sleighs and unwary pedestrians; past the miners coming off shift; past the lamplighter making his rounds in the crisp, clear cold of the evening; past the heavy-laden squaws, with their bowed heads, their papooses on their backs, their weary arms bearing home the spoils of a hard day's work, and the sore-eyed yellow dogs trudging, too, wearily and dejectedly at their heels, toward the rest of the wickiup and the acrid warmth of the sage-brush camp-fire.

In short, swift sentences, as they hurdled over artificially raised obstructions, or slid along the firm-packed snow, or grated on the muddy cross-streets, Princess Split told her plan--with reservations. She was not prepared to admit to so humble a worshiper the secret of her birth, but the magnanimous self-sacrifice of a beautiful nature, the heroine concealed beneath a frivolous exterior--these she was willing Jack Cody should suspect and admire.

"We'll lift them up, you and I, Jack. I'm going 'to--to be the angel of a homeless tribe,' or something like that," she quoted, as it grew darker and the sled slowed down a bit, where the slant of the hill-street became gentler and she need not hold on tight. "You'll be their general and I their princess. You'll teach them to be fine soldiers, so that the people in town will be afraid of them and have to give them back their lands--and the mines, too. They're theirs, and they shall have them and be millionaires. And, of course, so will we. We'll own all the stocks and brokers' offices, and after a few years, when they're quite civilized, we'll come up to town to live. We'll take Bob Graves's 'Castle' and--Jack! Ah!"

A long scream burst from her. Never in her life had Split Madigan screamed like that. For an incredibly fleet instant she actually saw above her head a struggling horse's hoofs. In the next, her calico-wrappered knight had thrown himself and his lady out into the great drifts on the side. Split felt the cold fleeciness of new-fallen snow on her face, down her neck, up her sleeves. She was smothered, drowned in it, when with another tug the boy whirled her to her feet, and swaying unsteadily, she looked up into the face of the man whose horses had so nearly crushed her life out.

It was her father--she knew it was. Else why had fate so strangely thrown them together? Yes, this was her true father. No other girl's father could have so handsome a fur coat as that reaching from the tips of this very tall man's ears to his heels. No other could have a sleigh so fine, and silver-belled horses fit for a king. No other could have such bright brown eyes beneath heavy sandy brows, such red, red cheeks, and so long and silver-white a beard which the sun could still betray into confession of its youthful ruddiness. What if he did have, too, a brogue so soft, so wheedling that men had long called him Slippery Uncle Sammy?

Split waked with a humiliating start from her lesser, less genteel dreams. Of course this bonanza king driving up from the mine was her real father, and she a bonanza princess, happier, more fortunate than a merely political one; for princesses have to live in Europe, where Madigans cannot see and envy them.

With the mien of one who has come at last into her own, Split accepted his invitation to carry her up to town, and, with a facetious twinkle in his eyes that added to his likeness to a stately Santa Claus (though his was not a reputation for benevolence), he lifted her and set her down under the silky fur rugs.

Split nestled back in perfect content: at last she was fitly placed.

"Hitch on behind, Jack," she cried patronizingly, and the bonanza king's sleigh went up the hill with its queer freight: queer, for this was that one of them whose strength was subtlety, whose forte was guile, whose left hand knew not the charitable acts of his right--and neither did the right, for that matter.

Thoroughly sophisticated are Comstock children as to the character of the masters of their masters, and Split Madigan knew how foreign to this man's nature a lovable action was. All the more, then, she valued the distinction which chance--fate--had made hers. And all the more did a something fierce and lawless and proud in herself leap to recognize the tyrant in him. Kings should be above law, as princesses were, was Split's creed; else why be kings and princesses?

"An' where would ye be a-goin' to, down this part o' the world so late?" she heard the unctuous voice above her inquire.

Split was silent. That the daughter of a bonanza king should have fancied for a moment that Indian Jim could be her father!

"An' who's the gyurl with ye--the witch ye call Jack?"

"'T isn't a girl." That virility which Split's wild nature respected and admired forbade her denying the boy his sex. "It's a boy--Jack--Jack Cody."

King Sammy laughed. His was rich, strong laughter, and men who heard it on C Street (they had reached the main thoroughfare now, so fleet were these kingly horses of Split's father) knew it--and knew, too, what poor, mean thoughts lay behind it.

"An' this Cody," he said, turning his handsome head to look down at the boy on his sled behind. "Cody--Cody, now," he continued, with royalty's marvelous memory, "your father killed in the Ophir--eh? Time of the fire on the 1800--yes--yes! An' I was goin' to give him a point that very day. Well--well!"

"Ye did!" The boy looked up resentful, and met those smiling, crafty eyes.

"No! An' he sold short? Too bad! Too bad! I thought sure that stock was goin' down. My, the bad man that told me it was! I hope he didn't lose?" he chuckled.

"All we had," said the boy.

"Tut--tut--tut! What a pity! Haven't I always said it's wicked to deal in stocks!" The king shook his sorrowful old head, then turned to the princess beside him. "An' it's out for a ride ye'd be, sweetheartin' on the sly, eh?"

"He's not! I was not!" Split's cheeks grew hotter. He was her father, this splendid, handsome king, yet never had she felt for poor Francis Madigan what she felt now for the man beside her.

"What, then?"

"I was going down for--for a reason," she stammered.

"To be sure! To be sure!" chuckled his old Majesty. "An' ye've told your father an' mother ye were goin', no doubt."

"No, I--didn't. I--couldn't."

"Coorse not; coorse not, but ye--"

"Let me out!" cried Split.

The sneer in his voice had set her aflame. She rose in the sleigh, cast off the furs, and, stamping like a fury, tried to seize the reins.

"Ho! Ho!" The old monarch's bowed broad shoulders shook with laughter as he caught her trembling hands and held them. "What a little spitfire! A divvle of a temper ye've got, my dear. Cody, now, does he like gyurls with such a temper?"

"Will you let me out?" Her voice was hoarse with anger.

"Can't ye wait till we get t' a crossin', ye little termagant?"

"No--no!" She tore her hands from him, and, with a quick, lithe leap from the low sleigh, landed, a bit dazed, in the snow banked high on the side of the street.

Uncle Sammy stared after her a moment. Then he remembered the boy behind.

"Hi--there!" he cried, looking over his shoulder as he reached for his whip. "Git!"

But Cody had the street-boy's quickness. All he had to do was to let go the end of rope he held, and the leg-breaker slipped smoothly back, while the king's runnered chariot shot ahead, drawn by the flying horses on whose backs the whip had descended.

"Ugh!" shivered Split, as she made her way out of the drift. "It's cold, Jack. Let's run."

Together they hauled the leg-breaker up the hill, parting at the snow-caked, wandering flights of steps, which seemed weary and worn with their endless task of climbing the mountain to Madigan's door.

Irene mounted them quickly. She was cold, and it had grown very dark and late; so late that the lamp shone out from the dining-room, warning her that it must be dangerously near to dinner-time. She had reached the last flight when Sissy came flying out along the porch to meet her.

"Split--ssh!" she cautioned, with a friendliness that surprised Split, who remembered how well she had washed that round, innocent face in the snow only a few hours ago--the face of Sissy, the unforgiving. "Dinner's ready," she went on, "but father isn't down yet. Go round the back way, and you can get in without his knowing how late you are."

Split did not budge. The sight of Sissy had made her a Madigan again, prepared for any emergency the appearance of her arch-enemy might portend. "What are you up to?" she demanded suspiciously.

"Oh!" Sissy turned haughtily on her heel. "If you want to go in and catch it--go."

But Split did not want to catch it. Her day's experience had made her content to bear the eccentricities of her humble foster-father, but she was by no means anxious to be the instrument that should provoke a characteristic expression of them.

She slipped around the back way, passing through Wong's big kitchen, the heat and odors of which were grateful messages of cheer to her chilled little body. She flew up-stairs and tore off her wet clothing, and was out in the hall, buttoning hastily as she walked, when the door-bell rang.

In some previous existence Split Madigan must have been a most intelligent horse in some metropolitan fire department. It was her instinct still to run at the sound of the bell; every other Madigan, therefore, delighted in preventing that impulse's gratification. But this time Bessie came hurriedly to meet her and even speed her on her errand.

"Quick--it's your father, Split!" she cried.

Split looked at her. She trusted Bep no more than she did Sissy, whose lieutenant the blonde twin was.

"Oh, you needn't glare at me!" exclaimed Bep, her guilty conscience sensitive to accusation by implication. "Fom told me all you told her about him. She was 'fraid you were coming after her for letting you fall off the see-saw, and she told me the whole thing. She said you expected him to-night--don't you?"

"How--do you know it's--my father that's at the door?" demanded Split, all the warier of the enemy because of her acquaintance with her secret.

"Why!" Bep opened clear, china-blue eyes, as shallow and baffling as bits of porcelain. "Hasn't he been here once for you already, while you were out?"

Split turned and ran down the hall. In the minute this took she had lived through a long, heart-breaking, childish regret--regret for the familiar, apprehension of the unknown. It was so warm and snug in this Madigan house; she seemed so to belong there. Why must that unknown parent come to claim her just now, when her spirit was still sorely vexed with the failings of the various fathers she had borne with in one short afternoon!

She got to the top of the staircase that led down to the front door, when she saw that some one had preceded her. It was Madigan, who was on his way down to dinner; poor old Madigan, with his slippered, slow, but positive tread, his straight, assertive back expressing indignation, as it always did when his door-bell was rung. Oh, that familiar old back! Something swelled in Split's throat and held her choking, as she grasped the banister and gazed yearningly down upon him. For a moment she had the idea of flying down past him to save him from what was coming. But it was too late; already he had his hand on the door-knob. Did he know who it was for whom he was opening his door? Split gasped. Did he anticipate what was coming? Some one ought to tell him--to break it to him--to--

But evidently Split herself could not have done this, for in almost the identical moment that Madigan resentfully threw open the door, a stream of water was dashed into his astonished face.