Part 17 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.