Yet Sissy held her breath. Something in the still purity of the air, the savage grandeur of the mountains, the great arch of liquid blue above her, caught and held her impressionable spirit. She stretched out her hands—a small, petticoated Balboa—to the world she had discovered. "It—it makes you want to scream," she stammered.
"Booh!" It was a yell from Cody, delivered full in her ear. "If you want to scream, darn it, scream!" was his practical advice as he spat out the sunflower-seeds he had been chewing and prepared to climb the pole.
Sissy stood looking at him, the color flooding her face. And as he noted her expression, the boy suddenly remembered that he did not like Split's sister. But his mild memory of distaste was as nothing to the disgust that possessed Sissy. In her ecstasy she had unwittingly lifted a corner of the lid that she kept tight over her emotions. Logically, she hated the unimpressed and profane witness of the phenomenon.
She turned her back on him, refusing even to look at his progress up the high pole. She would not see when, at its top, small as a fly at the point of a pencil, he waved his hat and, ululating brassily, gave vent to the desire to be noisily vocal which had clutched Sissy's throat into silence. At luncheon, she found a spot that was farthest from him; and when he and Split tore noisily down the mountain's side on the way back, she submitted rather to be outdone than to join a party of which he was one.
Crosby Pemberton, bracing himself for the derision he expected from her, was delighted to see her come sliding down alone to the ravine, where the successful ones paused to take up the rest of the party. Her solitary state encouraged him, and he sought her where she sat knocking the sand out of her shoe.
"Sissy," he said softly, holding out a peace-offering, "I saved some cream-puffs for you."
But the ruthless Sissy was not to be so easily placated. "You mean for Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you know. I didn't."
With the look of a wounded dove, Crosby turned, and Sissy saw Irene a moment later, her teeth gluttonously closed over one of Delia's biggest puffs, a heart-breaking amount of "filling" gushing over her cheeks and chin.
But to do without for the sake of principle was ever rapture to the purist. Sissy placed the pangs of desire to the credit side of Crosby's account; this was only one thing more she owed her victim. In fact, as the party started on, so engaged was she in inventing and perfecting tortures for him that she followed the procession on its unusual detour without demur. It was only when it was too late that she saw Bullion Ravine ahead of her, and the swaying high trestle over which the flume is carried.
Split's malicious face as that most sure-footed of Madigans touched the first plank made Sissy realize the test to which she was to be put. Her terror of giddy heights was treated as an absurd affectation by the steady-headed Madigans, and as such requiring discipline, which, with truly sisterly foresight, Split had provided. She ran across now with the joy of a thing that feels itself flying. Jack Cody turned a handspring in the very middle; and the sight so nauseated Sissy that she had to stand aside and let those immediately behind her pass first. Yet she dared not remain till the last, for a panicky picture in her mind showed her to herself paralyzed forever on the brink. As she put her foot on the first board, beneath which she could hear the running water chuckling and gurgling as it ran, she swore to herself that she would not look down. And, indeed, she did keep her eyes on Crosby Pemberton's straw hat, as he walked some distance in front of her. But the moment his foot touched the ground on the other side, the light structure, relieved of his weight, changed its rhythmic swaying, which had measured the steady strength of his step. Its rebound, exaggerated by Sissy's tense nerves, seemed sickeningly high; its fall ghastly low. Swung there from mountain to mountain, its slender supports looked frail as a spider's woof, and seemed to tremble with every gasping breath she drew. In spite of herself, her eye caught the silvery glitter of the thread of water far below in the stony bed of the nearly dry creek.