Frank's induction into the game led to a grand battle between Split and Sissy, the latter contending that the baby's fingers could not properly handle and shoot the marbles. But Sissy ought to have known better than to make such a point, as the Madigans had a peculiar way of playing fats, for which Frank—being a Madigan—was as fitted by nature as any of her seniors.
It consisted, first, in hauling out the big box of marbles, in which the booty won by the whole family was kept—the Madigans were gamblers, of course, as was everything born on the Comstock. Second, in a desperate controversy as to how the marbles were to be divided. Third, in a compromise, which necessitated that a complete count be made of every marble in the box—and the Madigans' unfeminine skill made this a question of handling hundreds of them, of suspiciously watching one another, of losing and of finding; and it all took time. Fourth, a decision as to handicaps. Fifth, a heated discussion of the relative values of puries, pottries, agates, crystals, and 'dobies. Sixth, a fiery attack from Sissy on Split's lucky taw. Seventh, the falling asleep of Frank squarely over the ring. And eighth, the sending of the whole tribe to bed by Aunt Anne—the entire evening having been taken up with arranging an order of business, and not a stroke of business accomplished.
But the Split sphere of influence over the disputed territory of Frances was considerably circumscribed by the affair of the stagecoach. It stood—a dusty, lumbering vehicle that made daily trips down from the mountain to the small towns in the cañon—upon a raised platform in front of Baldy Bob's. Baldy Bob, who departed with it the first thing in the morning and returned late in the afternoon, hauled it each day up on to the platform, intending to get out the hose and wash it off—after dinner when he came back from downtown. But he never came back till time to hitch up and start down the cañon again. So the old coach was left high and dry, while the sun went down behind Mount Davidson and the brightest stars in all the world shone out from a black-blue firmament unmarred by the smallest haze.
Till Split discovered it.
To Split, who had never traveled by any means other than her own lithe limbs and Jack Cody's sled, the coach's big, low, dusty body, its heavy high wheels, its dusky interior smelling of heated leather and twig-scented, summer-sunned country dust, were romance incarnate. It meant voyaging to her, this coach: strange sights, queer peoples, the sea that she had never seen, the rippling of rivers she had never heard, the smell of pasture-land, of pine forests, of lake-dipped willows, of flowers—valleys full of flowers, like those that bloomed in Mrs. Pemberton's garden, but unlike those enchanted blossoms in not being irrevocably attached to the bush on which they grew, and unguarded by any Mrs. Ramrod, whose most gracious act was to hold up a rose on its stalk between forefinger and thumb and permit a flower-hungry girl to bend down and sniff it. On the same principle, Mrs. Ramrod showed her preserves, but she never bestowed a rose "for keeps," nor did it ever seem to occur to her that one might want a taste of that which made her glass jars so temptingly beautiful.
Split "took a dare" the first time she mounted Baldy Bob's coach. She climbed up to the driver's high seat in front with as much hidden trepidation but as unhesitatingly as she would have plunged down a shaft, to show Sissy, who was a coward, how brave her sister was.
But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's coach Split was seized with Wanderlust. She sat erect and still up there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and flying past, on great rolling fields of grain—perhaps a smooth, light, continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box.
Yet with the advent of Frances into this strange game of rapt silences there came a change. Frank's imagination did not tempt her abroad strange countries for to see; she merely wanted to ride down and off the platform.
"Make it go, Split," she begged, with a trust in her big sister's capacity that Split would have perished rather than admit to be unfounded.
"Will you hold on tight?" she asked Frances.