Cody looked at her. It was really the first time he had regarded her as an unrelated individual. "Ye know what a boy does when a girl st jump.
But she held herself very primly, and the masking puritan in her voice quelled him. "If he's a coward—yes," she responded haughtily, hurrying on.
The boy looked after her as he joined Split. "She's funny—your sister," he said lamely.
"Who—Sissy? Oh, she's always cranky," said Irene, with Madigan candor when a relative was criticized.
They hurried on. The barn-like opera-house is built uphill, like all buildings on Virginia City's cross-streets, and it seems to burrow into as well as climb the hill. In the rear, on the side where its boards were unpainted and unplaned, certain knots had been converted into knot-holes by the initiated.
Sissy was already on her knees, her eye glued to one of these apertures. All she could see was a short curve of empty seats, a man's shoulder and another's hat, a long space, and then the passing of a neat, long pair of women's gaiters unhidden by skirts, and soon after the nervous following of a smaller pair of women's ties.
"Why," she said, with a deep blush, fixing one eye upon the company, while the other blinked from the strain put upon it, "they're women! It's a women's walking-match."
"Sure," said Cody, without withdrawing his attention for a moment from the view inside. "The big, long feet belong to the one they call La Tourtillotte. She's French. The German one's Von Hagen."
"I think it's a shame," gasped Sissy. "Let's go home, Split."
Split, at her own particular knot-hole, affected not to hear. But Crosby Pemberton, perched in the elbow of some long scantlings bracing the building, took heart at Sissy's words.