The Madigans Part 13

"Where?" At this minute it was Fom's turn to be dangerously high, and she wriggled to the uttermost end of the plank to counterbalance her sister's weight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She glanced up the incline of the see-saw to the height whence Irene looked down"]

A mysterious smile overspread Irene's face. It became broadly triumphant as she rose presently on the short end of the board, her arms daringly outspread, her toes upturned in front of her, her agile body well balanced, her spirit exulting in the sense of danger without and superiority within.

"When?" asked Florence, with that amiable readiness to consider a question unasked, so becoming to the va.s.sal. "When are you going?"

"To-night--maybe." Her own words startled Irene. She loved to play upon Fom's fears, but she had not really intended committing herself so far.

"He may call for me to-night," she added, with qualifying emphasis.

"Who? Not--not--"

"Yes, my father. I must be ready at any time, you know."

Fom looked alarmed. She had heard long ago and in strict confidence about Split's lofty parentage. She had even accepted drafts upon her future, rendering services which were unusual in a Madigan f.a.g, with the understanding that when the Princess Split should come into her own, she would richly repay. But she had never before heard her speak so positively or set a time when their relations.h.i.+p must cease.

A feeling of utter loneliness came over Split's faithful ally. She saw the balance of power in the Madigan oligarchy rudely disturbed. She beheld, in a swift, dread vision, the undisputed supremacy of the party of Sissy. Dismay entered her soul and shook her body, for with the brunette of the twins emotion and action were synonymous. "Oh, don't go, Split!" she begged, squirming unhappily at her end of the plank. "Don't go!"

High up in the air, Split smiled superbly. There was _n.o.blesse oblige_ in that smile; also the strong teasing tincture which no Madigan could resist using, even upon her closest ally.

"Oh, Split--o-o-oh, Split!" wailed Fom, forgetting in her wriggling misery how close she already was to the end of the plank.

A crash and a b.u.mp and a squeal told it to her all at once. She had slid clear off, getting an instantaneous effect of her haughty sister unsupported at a dizzy eminence, before Split came b.u.mping down to earth, the see-saw giving that regal head a parting, stunning tap as the long end finally settled down and the short one went up to stay.

It was never in the ethics of Madigan warfare to explain the inexplicable. Florence was on her feet, flying as though for her very life, before Split, shaken down from her dreams, quite realized what had happened. And she was still sitting as she had fallen when Jim, the Indian, came for the sawbuck.

Jim limped, his eyes were sore and watery, and it took him two weeks to conquer the Madigan woodpile, which any other Piute in town could have leveled in half the time.

"Him fall, eh?" he asked, dismantling the see-saw with that careful leisureliness that accounted for the Chinaman Wong's contempt for Indians.

"Not him; _her_, Jim."

Split possessed a pa.s.sion for imparting knowledge, of which she had little, and which was hard for her to attain.

Jim grinned.

"She no got little gal like you teach her Inglis," he said, gently apologetic.

"Not she, Jim; _he_. How old is your little girl?" Split remembered that a genteel interest in the lower cla.s.ses is becoming to the well-born.

"He just big like you," Jim responded mournfully, drawing the back of his brown hand across his nose. "But he all gone."

"Dead?" Split crossed her legs uneasily as she squatted, and lowered her voice reverently.

"He no dead," Jim said, lifting the sawbuck and easing it on his shoulder. "One Washoe squaw steal him--little papoose, nice little papoose. Much white--like you, missy. So white, squaw say no sure Injun."

"Jim!"

"Take him down Tluckee valley. Take him 'way. Jim see squaw one day long time 'go--Washoe Lake--shoot ducks. Heap shoot squaw. He die, but he say white f.a.ginia man got papoose."

"Jim!" It was the faintest echo of the first terrified exclamation.

"Come f.a.ginia, look papoose. No find. Chop wood long time. Heap hogady--not much dinner. Nice papoose--white, like you."

Jim paused. He expected sympathy, but he hoped for dinner. When he saw he was to get neither, he hunched his lame hip; scratched his head, balanced the sawbuck, and shuffled away.

Too overcome to move, Split sat looking after him. Her father! This, then, was her father! She was dazed, helpless, too overwhelmed even to be unhappy yet.

There came a shrill call for her from Kate, and Split, with unaccustomed meekness, staggered obediently to her feet. What was left for her but to be a slave, she said stonily to herself. She was an Indian like--like her father! And Sissy had noticed the resemblance that very afternoon!

"It's the bell, Split," explained Kate, who was reading "The Spanish Gypsy" in the low, hall-like library.

She had begun to read the book for the reason that no one in her cla.s.s at school had read it--usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finis.h.i.+ng it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her, till she should know the end.

"Shall I go?" asked Split, humbly, looking up at her sister.

Kate looked up, too surprised by her sister's docility to do anything but nod. She had antic.i.p.ated a battle, a ring at the door-bell being the signal for a flying wedge of Madigans tearing through the hall, with inquisitive Irene at its apex--except when she was asked to answer it.

The sisters' eyes met: those of the elder, in her thin, dark, flushed face, hazy with romantic happiness; those of the younger bright with romantic suffering, demanding a share of that felicity which transfigured her senior.

"What're you reading, anyway, Kate?" she asked.

As well tap the bung of a cask and ask what it holds. Kate began chanting:

"'Father, your child is ready! She will not Forsake her kindred: she will brave all scorn Sooner than scorn herself. Let Spaniards all, Christians, Jews, Moors, shoot out the lip and say, "Lo, the first hero in a tribe of thieves!"

Is it not written so of them? They, too, Were slaves, lost, wandering, sunk beneath a curse, Till Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were born, Till beings lonely in their greatness lived, And lived to save their people.'"

It poured from Kate's lips, the story of the lady Fedalma and her Gipsy father, a stream of winy romance, a sugared impossibility preserved in the very spirits of poetry.

Again the old bell jangled, and again. Kate was glutted, drunk with the sound of the verbal music that had been chorusing behind her lips; while for Irene every word seemed charged with the significance of special revelation. The light seemed to leap from her sister's eyes to kindle a conflagration in her own.

"Read it again--that part--Kate! Read it!" she cried.

And Kate, not a bit loath, turned the page and repeated:

"'Lay the young eagle in what nest you will, The cry and swoop of eagles overhead Vibrate prophetic in its kindred frame, And make it spread its wings and poise itself For the eagle's flight.'"

Split breathed again, a full, deep breath of satisfaction. An Indian--she, Split Madigan? Perhaps; but an Indian princess, then, with a mission as great, glorious, and impossible as Fedalma's own.

When at last she did turn mechanically to answer the bell, she saw that Sissy had antic.i.p.ated her and was showing old Professor Trask into the parlor. Ordinarily Irene loved to listen at the door while Sissy's lesson was in progress; for Trask was a nervous, disappointed wreck, whose idea of teaching music seemed to be to make his pupils as much like himself as harried youth can be like worried age. But on this great day the joy of hearing the perfect Sissy rated had not the smallest place in her enemy's thoughts. A poet's words had lifted Irene in an instant from child h.e.l.l to heaven, had fired her imagination, had rekindled her pride, had given back her dreams.

Reality was not altogether so pleasant, she found, when she went into the kitchen, skirmished with the Chinese cook for Jim's dinner, and went out to the woodpile to give it to him herself.

She did not wait to see him eat it--she was not poet enough for that; and, that impersonal, composite father, her tribe, was calling her.

Pulling on her hood and jacket, with her mittens dangling from a red tape on each side, she flew out and down the long, rickety stairs which a former senator from Nevada had built up the mountain's side, when he planned for his home a magnificent view of the mountains and desert off toward the east.

Split did not look at either, though they shone, the one like a billowy moonlit sea, the other like a lake of silver, because of the snow that covered them. She half ran, half slid down the hilly street till she came to a box-like miner's cabin, where Jane Cody, the washerwoman, lived with her son. In front of it she halted and called imperiously: