t to do.
There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire,
and much that was Irish. Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric
Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the
Bijou. Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday
performance, sheet music in hand, and say, "Listen, dearie. We've got
some new business I want to wise you to. Right here it goes 'TUM
dee-dee DUM dee-dee TUM DUM DUM.' See? Like that. And then Jim
vamps. Get me?"

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment. Then, "Like
this, you mean?"

"That's it! You've got it."

"All right. I'll tell the drum."

She could play any tune by ear, once heard. She got the spirit of a
thing, and transmitted it. When Terry played a martial number you
tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your
shoulders. When she played a home-and-mother song you hoped that the
man next to you didn't know you were crying (which he probably didn't,
because he was weeping, too).

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence.
Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the
ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the
cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes
in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy
legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semiprofessional tone. The more
conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance. There never had
been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona considered her rather fly.
Terry's hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little,
close-fitting scarlet turbans. Terry's mother had died when the girl
was eight, and Terry's father had been what is known as easygoing. A
good-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business. He
drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any
money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men
who did not. His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his
lumber did not crack. Riches are not acquired in the contracting
business in that way. Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends.
When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like a
banshee, and dropped to the floor.

After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan'