The Madigans Part 11

"What's she going to say?" demanded Bep.

"How should I know?" asked Fom, airily; and then, hurrying on, while she made Mrs. Clair bow low before the ready-made physician, "I am Mrs.

Clair, doctor, the rich Mrs. Guy St. Gerald Clair who has all the money--"

"It's no such thing! It's no such thing!" shrieked Bep.

"Well, Miss Florence Madigan!" exclaimed Mrs. Clair by proxy, "if your sister Bessie ain't the rudest!"

"I'll smash her if she says that again!" came in a bellow from Bep.

"You touch my doll!" Daringly Fom placed Mrs. Clair within tempting distance of Bep's hand.

"Well--just you let her say it again!"

"I don't need to. She's told me, so now I know it."

"You may go down-stairs again, doctor. It's a mistake," said Bep, addressing the medical man. (The twins always tried to keep up appearances before their dolls.) "Mr. Clair--the awfully rich Mr. Guy St. Gerald Clair--is not sick at all. But you can send your bill to him anyway, he won't care. It must have been some poor relation of Mrs.

Clair's--she didn't have a dress to her name before she married, you know."

"Oh--oh! Bessie Madigan!"

"Well, she didn't," said Bep, stoutly.

"I'll bet you--I'll bet you a shut-up. There!" Cautious Fom rarely hazarded so great a stake; but she felt that the occasion demanded something adequate.

"All right; I'll leave it to Sissy." It was from Sissy that Bep had inherited Mr. Clair. She would know.

Laying down stiff all-china Anita Clair, whose shoes she was painting red to match her sash, Bep followed her twin into the house.

But the omnivorous Sissy was reading "The Boys of England"--a thing Sissy loved to do; for it was a magazine not permitted to enter Mrs.

Pemberton's immaculate house, a recommendation in itself, and, besides, Split, to whom Jack Cody had loaned it, was doubtless looking all over for it at this very moment. Lying luxuriously flat upon the floor and eating chocolate, Sissy had just got to that part where Jack Harkaway "with one flash of Abu Hadji's ruby-incrusted simitar decapitated the unfortunate Arab, and d.i.c.k Lightheart, seizing the bewitching Haidee, had mounted his horse"--when the belligerent twins found her.

"Now, let me say it," began Fom.

"No; you won't ask it fair.... Sissy, tell me, wasn't Mr.--"

"Tra--la--la--la!" sang Fom, shrilly, drowning Bep's voice.

"Say!" Sissy looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could not. At eleven she s.h.i.+vered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a tragedy in the mine--whose tall chimneys she could see from her window--was as intangibly distant and irrelevant as weekly statistics of the superintendent's mining reports.

Her juniors harkened respectfully; but neither would permit the other to ask the question, for fear of its revealing the nature of the answer hoped for. So they withdrew for a period, returning with the following query, which Bep allowed Fom to put, so sure was she of the response:

"Did or did not Mrs. Clair ever have a dress before she married Mr.

Clair?"

To this the oracle gave answer:

She did not, for how could she, she being Mr. Clair's second wife; his first, an accomplished lady, but all-solid china, having fallen from the top story of the apartment-house and smashed herself into bits, and the widower having himself accompanied Sissy and Split to the shop to select her successor, whose first gown was, of course, a heavy mourning robe.

Bep heaved a deep sigh of content. She ran back to the woodshed so relieved that, although she had won a valuable shut-up, she did not care to "trophy" in her victory. Fom followed. But her grief for Mrs. Clair was bitterer even than her own disappointment.

"I want the Smith twins," she said stiffly, when they got back to the dolls' sky-sc.r.a.per. And Bep understood.

The Smith twins were an invention of technical Fom's that had become an inst.i.tution with herself and her playmate. Two tiny china dolls dressed in baby long clothes (the better to hide the fact that they were legless), the one with pink, the other with a blue sash, were brought up from the lowest story, where broken-nosed Mrs. Smith lived with her family of cripples.

They were dolls of bad omen, these two, but following instead of prophesying a storm. When it became absolutely necessary for one Madigan twin to be "mad" at the other, and yet that the business of playing be uninterrupted, the Smith twins invariably made their appearance. They were supposed to save one's dignity; in reality, they lent piquancy to games and rendered "making up" delightful.

Occasionally Bep and Fom did disown each other and adopt a chum from the outside world. One Beulah, known as "Bombey," Forrest was always ready obligingly to serve either or both of them in the capacity of dearest friend. But other playmates were tame after being accustomed to a Madigan; and each twin was so jealously afraid of the other's having a good time without her that she spent most of the period of estrangement trying to spy out what the other and her interloping companion were doing.

The Smith twins were easier.

"Tell Bep," said Florence to the pink-sashed small Smith, "that I think she's a nasty mean thing, and Mrs. Clair'll never forgive her."

"Tell Fom," returned Bep, with spirit, putting the blue-sashed Smith baby in her pocket as a sort of emergency battery, so that the wires of communication might be set up at any time between her twin and herself, "that I don't care a 'article for what she thinks. And Mrs. Clair's nothing but a beggar. I wonder that Mr. Clair married her!"

The war was on.

Down on the dump, that fascinating mountain of soft, glittering waste rock, the G.o.dless twins went to dig on Christmas afternoon. The mining operations were elaborate that they projected there, particularly after Jack Cody's brother Peter joined them. While Peter was rigging up windla.s.ses with pieced-out cord, Fom, with a couple of tin cups purloined from Wong's kitchen, brought up the rock, piling it in miniature dumps at the mouth of their shaft. Bep's awkward fingers could be trusted only with the preliminary scooping out of the ground where a new shaft was to be sunk.

"Tell Fom," she said to the blue-sashed Smith twin in her pocket, "that I want the scooper; my hands are all sore."

"Tell Bep," returned Fom, quickly, "that she can't have it till Pete an'

I get through running our drift."

The excuse did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart for the "scooper"--a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore by hand.

But Fom was slim, and quick as a cat. She threw herself bodily upon both scooper and pick--the latter an old fork with but one tine left. Bep promptly threw herself on top of her twin, while Peter, a laconic lad, calmly set himself to rehabilitating the hind wheel of a battered tin toy express which served as a dump-cart.

"Little folks shouldn't quarrel," suddenly said a slow voice above the struggling arms and legs of the twins.

Fom looked up, still pressing her body hard against the tools in dispute, while Bep got to her feet, red-faced and panting. "We're not quarreling," said Florence, calmly.

Superintendent Warren Pemberton, still in his oilskins from a trip down the mine, looked down at her and gasped. He did not know the Madigan brunette twin, and actually thought she was lying. But Fom was never known to lie; she only pettifogged.

"You're not quarreling!"

"Nope."

"Didn't I see you with my own eyes?" he demanded, piqued.

"People don't see people quarreling," said Fom, didactically. "They hear them."

"Oh, that's it! Well, didn't I hear--"

"No, you didn't; for we're mad and don't speak to each other."

"But you're not quarreling?"