"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned longingly upward.
"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so yearningly—a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the shrill excited laughter of children.
"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on—"stranger even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for the Madigans?"
"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high carnival.
"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him.
"Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque dancing shadows.
"Eh?—I beg your pardon, I—I don't understand. Just what has happened?" asked the stranger.
"Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house afire."
"Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in striving to fathom a local mystery.
"Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em."