Madigan shut the book with a bang. The "martyring," boomerang that it had proved, was over.
The world seems new-born every summer morning in Virginia City. This little mining-town, dry, sterile, and unlovely, and built at an absurd angle up the mountain, is the poor relation of her fortunate cousins of the high Alps; yet shares with them their birthright—an open, boundless breadth of view, an endless depth of unpolluted, sparkling air, the fresh, shining virginity of the new-created.
It was the sense of a nature-miracle, and the desire to penetrate still farther and higher into the crystalline sky that crowned it, which sent the Madigans every summer toiling up Mount Davidson. They did not know it, but yearly the Wanderlust seized them, and as all things in Virginia point one way, they followed that suggestion—upward.
They were spared the usual struggle with Frances (who, after being coaxed, bribed, threatened, and bullied, had at last annually to be run away from), for the reason that Frank had not slept well after the martyring, and was still dreaming of creeping, crawling things with blubber-lips and gloating eyes when, in the pellucid dawn, Jack Cody found the Madigans waiting, in clean calicoes, perched on their bottommost step.
The sun was barely over the top of Sugar Loaf, and the town, scantily shrubberied (for water costs as many dollars in Virginia as there are weeks in the year), lay sleeping in soft chill shadow below them, looking oddly picturesque and strange in the unfamiliar light.
"Say," said Cody, "I think I see that Pemberton kid coming up Taylor. Is he coming along?"
"No," said Sissy, promptly.
"Yes," said Split, firmly.
"Well, I didn't ask him," from Sissy, with a haughty air of saying the last word. The Madigans were quite accustomed to being social arbiters in their own small world.