Part 20 (2/2)
A silence followed.
”Look here, Anne,”--Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be calm,--”you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt my--”
”I fail to see,” responded Miss Madigan, with dignity, ”why I should not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces'
sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities have--”
”In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!”
”Has Nora sent a box?” asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. ”You see, my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning--”
With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.
Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's letter:
As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan.
Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little matter of her never having seen him would not, of course, stand in her way.
”Of course not. Why should it?” Miss Madigan asked herself.
She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not--
Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.
The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them.
In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.
They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right s.e.x, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk unrecognized in the rear.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled”]
In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cut her adorer dead, dead, dead, and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and tyrannical) over the other s.e.x.
”Let's try to see the walking-match,” she suggested to Split.
”How can we, with all that tagging after us?”
With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had never before been out on a raid.
”Let 'em tag,” cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no obstacles.
Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing.
Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling, dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female projectile.
Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way of flourish to mark the conclusion of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught her, with a whoop of satisfaction.
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