iggle
from Split, already out in the hall.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. She shook off her suitor's detaining
hand and bolted.

"I couldn't help it," the savior said to Madigan, who was looking at him
with that perplexed frown which the manifestation of his children's
eccentricities so often brought to his face. "She is delightful. What
jolly times we'll have getting acquainted! How fortunate you are, Mr.
Madigan, to have these--"

Madigan threw up his head, a challenge in his eye. Was he even to be
congratulated upon his misfortunes?

"I always said," the savior went on, with a chuckle,--"in fact, I began
to say it before I got into knickerbockers,--that I intended to be the
father of a family numbering at least a 'baker's dozzen.' I believe I
had a vague notion that by means of superabundance of paternity I could
atone to myself for my lack of other family ties. I was always so
beastly alone. Yet no one--Miles Madigan least of all--saw the pathos of
my lot. 'He's young and unencumbered,' he said of me toward the last
when he was reminded of how little he had left for me. 'He'll get along.
Besides, there's that wildcat mine out in the States; I'm leaving him
that.'"

Madigan's pipe fell to the floor; he had been filling it for his
after-dinner smoke. "You've got the Tomboy!" he exclaimed.

"That interests you?" Morgan asked.

Kate, who picked up the pipe and handed it to her father, as she passed,
the last of the line of young Madigans on the way out, saw how Francis
Madigan's hand shook. Mechanically she paused and listened.

"I--I was swindled out of my share of that mine," he said harshly.
"Miles Madigan knew that in fairness half of it was mine. I found it. I
worked for it. I put aside all other opportunities to devote myself to
developing it. I sacrificed my children and my business to it. I gave up
the best years of my life to it. I bore disappointment and poverty
because of it. I was at the end of my tether when Miles Madigan went
into it with me; and yet when I saw he was bent on freezing me out of
it, I--I--But after he got it he didn't know what to do with it. He
left it to be worked and himself fleeced by strangers. But--it killed my
wife, and left me, after all those years of litigation, an embittered,
beggared, broken man!"

"And so it's but fair"--to Kate, shivering at the revelation in her
father's voice, Miles Morgan's words seemed like soothing music--"it's
but fair that you and I shou