own himself and his lady out into the
great drifts on the side. Split felt the cold fleeciness of new-fallen
snow on her face, down her neck, up her sleeves. She was smothered,
drowned in it, when with another tug the boy whirled her to her feet,
and swaying unsteadily, she looked up into the face of the man whose
horses had so nearly crushed her life out.

It was her father--she knew it was. Else why had fate so strangely
thrown them together? Yes, this was her true father. No other girl's
father could have so handsome a fur coat as that reaching from the tips
of this very tall man's ears to his heels. No other could have a sleigh
so fine, and silver-belled horses fit for a king. No other could have
such bright brown eyes beneath heavy sandy brows, such red, red cheeks,
and so long and silver-white a beard which the sun could still betray
into confession of its youthful ruddiness. What if he did have, too, a
brogue so soft, so wheedling that men had long called him Slippery Uncle
Sammy?

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 wh