hed, it
wrinkled, it twitched, and his shoulders began to shake silently.

"No! Sissy?" he exclaimed, with an appreciative chuckle, which made that
young perfectionist outside feel seasick, as though the hillside had
swelled up beneath her. "And who was the boy, might I ask?"

"It was"--Mrs. Pemberton paused to mark both her shocked surprise at Mr.
Madigan's reception of the news, as well as the further enormity
involved in its completion--"my son Crosby."

"No! Ha! ha! ha!" Madigan's rare laugh rang out.

Mechanically Sissy turned down her thumb to mark the number of times she
had heard it, since Split and she had made a wager on it. Inwardly,
though, she was nauseated by the thought that she was being laughed at.
As nearly destitute as a Madigan could be of humor, she would so much
rather have been flayed alive, she thought in the depths of her
puritanical soul, than suffer ridicule.

"Crosby--eh?" Madigan was recovering. "Congratulate him for me. I didn't
know the little milksop had it in him. You ought to thank Sissy, ma'am,
for proving that he is not really stuffed with sawdust. Where is she,
anyway?"

Lying flat, her blushing face buried in the sage-brush, was Sissy at
that moment, while Mrs. Ramrod rustled out of the room, precisely as she
had done the day Crosby failed in the public oral examination in
geography, Miss Madigan hurrying placatingly after.

But outside Sissy wept and would not be comforted. Her purist's pride
was wounded; her prudish maiden's modesty was outraged--that her own
father should believe it of her! And she must not open the subject or
try to alter his opinion, for fear of the ridicule which seared her very
soul!

* * * * *

A taste for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself
in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of
the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor
relied upon the school-children for chorus material, and upon the
Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular
features of his production must be a failure--this last as a matter of
course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not
leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of
environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least
important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had
of being talented the professor knew to be almost as