The Madigans Part 12

"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 b.u.t.ter-fingered,"--with an insulting glance at Bep,--"you can manage all right."

"But I'm not b.u.t.ter-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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 sa.s.sing 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 n.o.bly 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 n.o.ble 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."