Part 55

"Old Mother Gibson, be on your best behavior, Or you'll surely fail to satisfy the savior."

It didn't seem a very funny or apposite ditty to Miles Morgan, but, to judge by its effect upon those within, it was exquisitely witty. The whole company doubled up with laughter. It giggled till its collective sides must have ached; then it slowly and gaspingly subsided. When it had quieted down, the piano began again, and a red-headed Madigan, intoxicated by the music, the license of the time, and the excitement accompanying creative work, danced a fantastic pas seul, as she flew about in the Mother Gibson merry-go-round.

"Old Mother Gibson's savior was a dandy-- He thought he'd buy the Madigans with a stick of candy!"

sang Split, and the parlor yelled itself hoarse with uproarious delight.

The fat little girl at the piano began to play, and stopped several times, that she might wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and get her breath. At last, with a squaring of her shoulders and a stiffening of backbone that seemed queerly familiar to Morgan, watching outside, she half drawled, half sang, with an unmistakable accent:

"Old Mother Gibson was angry at the Fates; My word! They sent the savior 'way out to the States!"

A sudden enlightenment came to Miles Morgan. For a moment the red flamed up in his cheek, and if Split could have seen his face she might have fancied that some imp had caught her likeness, when her temper had got beyond her control, and set it on this man's body.

"The impudent little beggars!" Morgan cried furiously. "My word!" He stopped, remembering the use to which his favorite exclamation had been put. "But what a saucy lot!" He was laughing before he had finished wording his thought.

He was interested now, and listened with a grin to Fom's declaration that

"Old Mother Gibson ought to 've known better Then to come in answer to Aunt Anne's letter."

He saw even Frank strutting in the ring, though she was capable only of a repetition of the classic phrase with which each couplet began. And he laughed with the rest at Bep,--poor, unready Bep, set as by a musical time-lock and bound to go off,--getting slower and slower in motion as well as utterance, the accompaniment retarding sympathetically as the critical moment approached when she must be delivered of her rhyme.

"Old Mother Gibson, why do you--"

she began her singsong. "No, no! Wait. I know another. 'T ain't fair," she stammered in a prose parenthesis.

"Old Mother Gibson had a--

"Stop laughing, now; wait a minute. You don't give me a chance, Sissy. You play faster for me than for anybody else! You do it a-purpose, too, just 'cause you know it's easy to bluster me.

"Old Moth-er--Gib-son--"

Bep stopped suddenly, for through the glass doors came the subject of her lay. He had a finger to his lips as he glanced at Sissy's back--a hint that the rest of the company seized delightedly. And when the music began again, he was not ashamed to make this contribution:

"Old Mother Gibson, take pity on a cousin Left to the tender mercies of the other half-dozen!"

At first the accompanist, accustomed to the rodomontade of voice as well as gesture of the excited performers, was not aware of the interloper. When she finally spun around and saw the savior singing in the midst of his libelers, she let him finish the couplet unaccompanied, and sat, a fat, shocked statue glued to the piano-stool, staring at him.

It was absurd of him, but there was something in Old Mother Gibson, as the Madigans sang and played her, that turned the soberest of heads. And the savior's forte was not in being staid. He fell upon his knee before her.

"Forgive me, O Sissy, for not being a Madigan," he begged, "and receive me into the fold!"

She looked down at him, self-conscious, embarrassed; yet the hidden sentimentality of her nature was appealed to by the masculine young face turned half laughing, half seriously, to her.

"Are you sure," she asked shyly, "that you're not one already?"

* * * * *

It is of record that one evening during that summer when the old Tomboy mine was reopened, a young Irishman newly arrived on the Comstock escorted down to Fitzmeier's--where, everybody knows, there is ice-cream to be had--six girls of assorted ages, one boy, and two young persons whose garments belied their sex. Yet they all seemed rampantly happy and quite unashamed.