Split waked with a humiliating start from her lesser, less genteel dreams. Of course this bonanza king driving up from the mine was her real father, and she a bonanza princess, happier, more fortunate than a merely political one; for princesses have to live in Europe, where Madigans cannot see and envy them.
With the mien of one who has come at last into her own, Split accepted his invitation to carry her up to town, and, with a facetious twinkle in his eyes that added to his likeness to a stately Santa Claus (though his was not a reputation for benevolence), he lifted her and set her down under the silky fur rugs.
Split nestled back in perfect content: at last she was fitly placed.
"Hitch on behind, Jack," she cried patronizingly, and the bonanza king's sleigh went up the hill with its queer freight: queer, for this was that one of them whose strength was subtlety, whose forte was guile, whose left hand knew not the charitable acts of his right—and neither did the right, for that matter.
Thoroughly sophisticated are Comstock children as to the character of the masters of their masters, and Split Madigan knew how foreign to this man's nature a lovable action was. All the more, then, she valued the distinction which chance—fate—had made hers. And all the more did a something fierce and lawless and proud in herself leap to recognize the tyrant in him. Kings should be above law, as princesses were, was Split's creed; else why be kings and princesses?
"An' where would ye be a-goin' to, down this part o' the world so late?" she heard the unctuous voice above her inquire.
Split was silent. That the daughter of a bonanza king should have fancied for a moment that Indian Jim could be her father!
"An' who's the gyurl with ye—the witch ye call Jack?"
"'T isn't a girl." That virility which Split's wild nature respected and admired forbade her denying the boy his sex. "It's a boy—Jack—Jack Cody."
King Sammy laughed. His was rich, strong laughter, and men who heard it on C Street (they had reached the main thoroughfare now, so fleet were these kingly horses of Split's father) knew it—and knew, too, what poor, mean thoughts lay behind it.