Part 50

In that terrible moment Frank realized that there were drawbacks to being too well acquainted with the teacher. Her eyes filled with tears of chagrin. "'B, B, you stupid!'" she sobbed.

And a quick, clear laugh from the substitute completed the demoralization of the mixed primary. It was not, strictly speaking, "in order" when Mr. Garvan visited it.

* * * * *

Oh, to be out of school, at the end of that first day of adulthood! To be unwatched, to be free, to be little and young, if that pleased one! To walk up the hill and along the main street, and then, just as one was about to turn the corner prosaically and mount still higher--then to come face to face with a creature so elegant, so visibly "dressed," that no gambler in town could outshine him. By sheer good luck, to have been introduced to this dandy in one's capacity of teacher of the mixed primary that very morning, when he had been given permission by Mr. Garvan to make an announcement at the school concerning special privileges granted school-children at the "high-class minstrel performance" given at Lally's Opera House. To be unhampered now by the timidities of office, and ready to pick up the gage of coquetry his saucy glance threw down. And so, after the smallest second's hesitation,--the woman in one stifling both the child's and the substitute's hesitation,--to allow the gaudy stranger to walk beside one the length of C Street. And though the sidewalk was crowded, for stocks were up, and one had to wriggle one's way through the people packed tight in front of the brokers' offices, yet, in the very teeth of the townsfolk, to joy shamelessly in flirtation with this gorgeous, shining, flattering stranger--a social outlaw, as well as a bird of passage, the very disrepute of whose profession made temptation more subtly sweet!

* * * * *

"Split," whispered Sissy, her voice muffled with shame,--it was a week later,--"Kate walked with a minstrel! What shall we do?"

"Did she? Who told on her--Mrs. Ramrod? Well," added Split, out of the depths of experience, "it must have been that day she substituted."

OLD MOTHER GIBSON

Imprisoned in skirts, Jack Cody was awaiting his mother and relief, when there came a knock at the door, and a voice distinctly not Jane Cody's said:

"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, but your town's so jolly dark, I believe I've lost my way. I'm looking for--My word, what's that!"

A parabola of light had suddenly shot out athwart the soft black night. It seemed to come from the hill to the left, and it was accompanied by the tinkle of shattered glass.

"It's the Madigans." Jack's voice was wistful and his gaze was turned longingly upward.

"Madigans!" exclaimed the stranger, looking in amazement from the boyish face surmounting a shapeless woman's gown to the thing it watched so yearningly--a light flaring brightly on the hill, a lot of small dancing figures silhouetted blackly against it, the smell of coal-oil, and the shrill excited laughter of children.

"Upon my soul, yours is a strange country," the man went on--"stranger even than it looks. How in the world did you know that I was looking for the Madigans?"

"Are you?" asked the boy, dully. His body might be down in Jane Cody's cabin, but his soul was up aloft there where the Madigans held high carnival.

"Yes, I am," answered the stranger, his eyes fixed upon the odd figure before him.

"Well, there they are," the boy said, pointing upward to the grotesque dancing shadows.

"Eh?--I beg your pardon, I--I don't understand. Just what has happened?" asked the stranger.

"Nothin'," said Jack. "The lamp gets tipped over when they're playing Old Mother Gibson, and they just throw it out so's not to set the house afire."

"Every night?" asked the man, in the polite tone strangers adopt in striving to fathom a local mystery.

"Nope," said the boy, in a matter-of-fact tone. "They can't play it every night; sometimes their aunt won't let 'em."

"You appear to know them." There was a smile hidden beneath the voice; but Jack was thinking, not of the questioner, indistinguishable in the darkness, but of the mad carnival up yonder on the hill.

"Yep. That's Split," he said. "That one--see--with the bushy lot of hair, singing and cake-walking in front. She can do a cake-walk better'n any nigger I ever see."

"Indeed!"

"That's Frank, the baby--the one that's screamin' so. You can tell her squeals; they're laughin' ones, you know."

"I suppose I ought to know. Anyway, I'm glad to be told."

"Over on the side there, where there's a kind of blotch, is the twins; they must be fighting. Don, the dog, 's mixed up in it somehow."

"My word!" exclaimed the man, softly, to himself.