Part 17 (2/2)

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 was.h.i.+ng 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.

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