The Madigans Part 17

Thus Sissy had taken possession of her and made of her, in the short time her enthusiasm lasted, a visible replica of that which Sissy tried to delude herself into thinking was her own character. In those days she cut poor Frank's curls off and plastered the child's hair down in a strong-minded fashion. She insisted upon her disciple's p.r.o.nouncing clearly and distinctly. She inaugurated a regime of practical common sense, small rewards and severe punishments, and taught Frank how to count. But not to spell; for Sissy had introduced the fashion among Madigans of spelling out the word which was the key-note of a sentence--a proceeding that exasperated Frank. "Don't you let her have any c-a-n-d-y; Aunt Anne says 't ain't good for her," was a sample of the abuses that drove Frank nearly mad with curiosity and indignation.

But finally Sissy joined the Salvation Army with her protegee (religion had all the attraction of the impliedly forbidden to the Madigans), and was discovered by Francis Madigan one evening on C Street, putting up a fluent prayer in a nasal tremolo--an excellent imitation of the semi-hysterical falsetto of the bonneted enthusiast who had preceded her.

Madigan looked from Sissy--her hypocritical eyes upcast, while her soul was ravished by the whispered comment upon her precocity, to which she lent an encouraging ear--to Frank, kneeling angelically beside her.

Something in himself, his enthusiastic, emotional, long-forgotten, youthful self, felt the tug of sympathy at the sight, and, after his first irritated start, he stood there behind the watching crowd with no thought of interference.

"You can thank your stars, you unco guid la.s.sie," he said within himself, his sarcastic eyes on Sissy's holy face, "that you've not a more religious and more conventional man for a father. 'T is one like that would yank you out of your play-acting preaching, or my name's not Madigan--ahem!"

He did not know that the exclamation had been uttered aloud. Their father was unaware of the habit; but his daughters knew well that stentorian clearing of the throat which served for a warning that he was about to speak, and also a notification that he had spoken and would permit no difference of opinion. In the midst of her religio-dramatic ecstasy, Sissy heard that sound behind her, and jumped to her feet as though brought painfully back to a sorrowing, sinful world.

"And he tooked her," said Frances later, in relating the affair to an eager audience of Madigans, "and he whipped her awful!"

"With his whole hand?" asked Bep, feeling it to be the partizan's duty to doubt.

"Uh-huh!" The small fabricator nodded her head in slow and awful confirmation.

"That shows, Frank Madigan!" said Bep, scornfully turning her back. "He never whips with more than two fingers."

And yet it was the confident belief of the Madigans that if it had been anybody but Sissy, that somebody would have been eaten alive!

It was Split who next adopted the Last Straw. Under her tutelage Frank learned to climb her sister's body and stand upright and fearless on her shoulders. She was also initiated into the great game of "fats," which the Madigans played winter evenings on the crumb-cloth in the dining-room; said crumb-cloth being printed in large squares of red and white, one of which was chalked off for the ring.

Frank's induction into the game led to a grand battle between Split and Sissy, the latter contending that the baby's fingers could not properly handle and shoot the marbles. But Sissy ought to have known better than to make such a point, as the Madigans had a peculiar way of playing fats, for which Frank--being a Madigan--was as fitted by nature as any of her seniors.

It consisted, first, in hauling out the big box of marbles, in which the booty won by the whole family was kept--the Madigans were gamblers, of course, as was everything born on the Comstock. Second, in a desperate controversy as to how the marbles were to be divided. Third, in a compromise, which necessitated that a complete count be made of every marble in the box--and the Madigans' unfeminine skill made this a question of handling hundreds of them, of suspiciously watching one another, of losing and of finding; and it all took time. Fourth, a decision as to handicaps. Fifth, a heated discussion of the relative values of puries, pottries, agates, crystals, and 'dobies. Sixth, a fiery attack from Sissy on Split's lucky taw. Seventh, the falling asleep of Frank squarely over the ring. And eighth, the sending of the whole tribe to bed by Aunt Annethe entire evening having been taken up with arranging an order of business, and not a stroke of business accomplished.

But the Split sphere of influence over the disputed territory of Frances was considerably circ.u.mscribed by the affair of the stagecoach. It stood--a dusty, lumbering vehicle that made daily trips down from the mountain to the small towns in the canon--upon a raised platform in front of Baldy Bob's. Baldy Bob, who departed with it the first thing in the morning and returned late in the afternoon, hauled it each day up on to the platform, intending to get out the hose and wash it off--after dinner when he came back from downtown. But he never came back till time to hitch up and start down the canon again. So the old coach was left high and dry, while the sun went down behind Mount Davidson and the brightest stars in all the world shone out from a black-blue firmament unmarred by the smallest haze.

Till Split discovered it.

To Split, who had never traveled by any means other than her own lithe limbs and Jack Cody's sled, the coach's big, low, dusty body, its heavy high wheels, its dusky interior smelling of heated leather and twig-scented, summer-sunned country dust, were romance incarnate. It meant voyaging to her, this coach: strange sights, queer peoples, the sea that she had never seen, the rippling of rivers she had never heard, the smell of pasture-land, of pine forests, of lake-dipped willows, of flowers--valleys full of flowers, like those that bloomed in Mrs.

Pemberton's garden, but unlike those enchanted blossoms in not being irrevocably attached to the bush on which they grew, and unguarded by any Mrs. Ramrod, whose most gracious act was to hold up a rose on its stalk between forefinger and thumb and permit a flower-hungry girl to bend down and sniff it. On the same principle, Mrs. Ramrod _showed_ her preserves, but she never bestowed a rose "for keeps," nor did it ever seem to occur to her that one might want a taste of that which made her gla.s.s jars so temptingly beautiful.

Split "took a dare" the first time she mounted Baldy Bob's coach. She climbed up to the driver's high seat in front with as much hidden trepidation but as unhesitatingly as she would have plunged down a shaft, to show Sissy, who was a coward, how brave her sister was.

But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's coach Split was seized with _Wanderl.u.s.t_. She sat erect and still up there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and flying past, on great rolling fields of grain--perhaps a smooth, light, continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box.

Yet with the advent of Frances into this strange game of rapt silences there came a change. Frank's imagination did not tempt her abroad strange countries for to see; she merely wanted to ride down and off the platform.

"Make it go, Split," she begged, with a trust in her big sister's capacity that Split would have perished rather than admit to be unfounded.

"Will you hold on tight?" she asked Frances.

The child nodded, grasping the dashboard firmly. With the ease of long practice, Split got to the big wheel and leaped to the ground. She had noticed the big stone which Baldy Bob had slipped in front of the hind wheel, and she fancied it was part of the reason why the stagecoach could not be moved.

She was mistaken: it was the whole reason. And when Split had pushed and tugged and kicked with all her strength, laying herself flat at last and bracing her toes against the other wheel to get a leverage, her first feeling when she saw the coach move above her head was of delight at the unexpected. Her second was of unmixed terror; for, gaining an impetus from its descent on the inclined plane that led from the platform, the coach rattled briskly down Sutton Avenue, headed for the canon, with Frank clutching the dashboard and laughing aloud in glee.

Split Madigan had always fancied she could run. She never knew how impotent human fleetness is till she saw that lumbering coach go plunging swiftly and more swiftly away from her, across B Street, and tearing down the next hill with a speed that made her puny efforts laughable.

Baldy Bob, emerging from the saloon on the corner with that feverishly distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing so long promised. If it had been morning, he would have been properly afraid of getting in the way of the monster let loose. But in the evening Bob was accustomed to the occurrence of peculiar things. So he ran--at that time of day he could run better than walk--out to the middle of the street, threw up his arms, and called hoa.r.s.ely upon the mad thing to stop.

It did--for a moment, when it came in contact with his body; but it was long enough for its course to be deflected from the steep hill below and turned northward down the comparatively level cross street.

When Bob picked himself up and followed, he found a thin, white-faced, red-haired girl running swiftly beside him. Later he accompanied her and the plucky little Frank (still smiling and chuckling over her fine ride) up the hill to the home of Mr. Francis Madigan, where he demanded damages--both personal and mechanical.

"And fa-ther tooked her in his own room," Frank said with shuddering unction, as she told the tale, "and she's in there yet!"

It was Fom who awakened a sense of the beautiful in Frank. She and Bep were continually playing London Bridge, in the course of which it became necessary to demand:

"Which would you rather have (that means, like best): a diamond horse covered with stars, or a golden cradle with red silk pillows?"

Sentiment and the sad experience of her babyhood always prompted Frank to choose the cradle, of course. After which, her preference promptly became of no importance whatever; the whole beautiful business was put aside, and she was bidden to get behind Fom. She discovered later that whether she preferred diamonds and stars to gold and red silk, it was all the same: she invariably had to get behind one twin or the other, clasp her tightly about the waist, and pull--and pull--till the whole universe gave way and she plumped down on the ground with a big twin falling on top of her.

But there was another phase of the beautiful which was far more satisfactory to Frank, while it lasted. Fom discovered it one day when Split took Dora away from her, just because the brunette twin preferred her lunch to the burned potatoes Split had baked in the back yard when they were playing emigrants. It was then, in the depths of her grief, that the inspiration came to her.

"Shall Fom make you look awful pretty, Frank?" she asked, in the form which children suppose wheedles babies most successfully.

Frank didn't know; she was suspicious of the hollowness of the beautiful and the inutility of choosing. Besides, she was making dolls'

biscuit just then from a piece of dough Wong had given her, cutting out each individual bun with Aunt Anne's thimble.

But Florence coaxed and threatened and bribed, and when Francis Madigan got home that night to dinner, he found his big porch covered with children gathered from blocks around. Each held in his or her hand one pin or more--the price of admission to the show. (Fom was a most thrifty and businesslike Madigan.) And the show, which he as well as they saw in the interval between the opening of his front door and its swift closing, was Frances's plump, naked body draped in a sheet, posing, with uplifted arms and an uncertain, apprehensive smile, on a tottering draped pedestal, which fell with a crash when Fom, who was crouched behind steadying it, beheld her father's face.

"And he tooked her," with bated breath Frank repeated the monotonous refrain of her saga, "and he made her thwow evewy--pin--she'd made--out the fwont window!"

As a Madigan, Frances should have been above fear. She was--except of the tank in the back room up-stairs. Its gurglings and chucklings were more than mortal four-years-old could bear at night in the dark, particularly after Bep had taught her to be superst.i.tious.

Bep's nature was spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of remedies, and was ready to try a new one--on somebody else--whenever the occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and of speechless anger at the Madigans who followed mimicking her, Bep decided that she would try the latest cure she had heard of. So she wandered down to the gas-works one day, Frank's hand in hers, to give her patient the benefit of breathing the heavily charged atmosphere down there.

"How-do, Mrs. Grayson?" she greeted the gas-man's wife amiably, as she opened the kitchen door.

Mrs. Grayson, her babies leaving her side to cl.u.s.ter interestedly around Frank, replied that she and the children were well; that the epidemic of whooping-cough had not reached them because they lived so far out of town.

"Yes," a.s.sented Bep, politely; "and then, the smell of gas is so good for whooping-cough. That keeps 'em well. And that's why I brought Frank down here."

Mrs. Grayson's excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells kept off whooping-cough."

"No, neither did I, though p'r'aps it does. But it cures--I know that."

"You don't mean to say--" Mrs. Grayson flew like a terrified hen for her chicks, lifting two by an arm each clear from the ground and hustling the third into the kitchen before her.

"Yep, she's got it," said Bep, proudly. And Frank, feeling called upon to be interesting, burst into a convulsive corroboration of the glad tidings.

"You nasty little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson, as she shut the door in Bep's face.