Nancy and the Coggs twins

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Maizie, Daisy, Taizie and Hazie . . i

II. The Double Twins Migrate . . . 22

Chapter I

OUR tired girls had come in from their day’s work. They were little girls, or would have been so labelled if they had been coming home from school into a real home, with a mother in it But because they came home from their day’s work they were merely four young girls.

They looked so much alike that they could not be less than sisters, and might have been more; it was puzzling how they could be sisters and be all four, apparently, the same age. And they managed this by actually being more than sisters — they were two pairs of twins, Maizie and Daisy, Taizie and Hazie, the older pair fifteen, the younger pair, fourteen years old.

They were not pretty girls, but nobody would have minded that, for they were attractive. They had 1 bright reddiish hair that stood up cheerfully around their merry faces; round rosy faces they were, with large, jolly mouths and strong even white teeth and a chronic smile, short straight noses, and blue eyes that snapped and danced with the laughter that wrinkled them into fine lines in their corners.

The older pair wore dark blue dresses of a heavy cotton material, the younger pair dark skirts and shirtwaists; the older pair worked in a big department store, wrapping parcels; the younger pair were errand girls in the same dressmaking establishment. Entirely alone in the world these young creatures were earning their living and looking after themselves, as unafraid as the sparrows chattering outside their window. They had a room in a cheap tenement, which they had hired from the tenant of the remaining four rooms constituting the flat. It was a dark room, but, as Maizie pointed out, that did not matter, because they were away all day, except Sunday, and then they could “ hang around somewheres.” It was a cheap room because it was a dark one, and when there is not much money a low rent counts for more than light to four young owls who can only see their nest at night.

The room was sparsely furnished. A table held the three-burner gas stove on which the girls cooked what little was cooked there. It had to be disconnected from the gas to get illumination from it, so there was also a lamp. There were four chairs, of sorts; the beds were two mattresses and bedding, without the extravagance of bedsteads. In the morning the girls piled one cotton mattress on the other and folded up the clothing before going to work, by way of setting in order for the empty day while they were gone.

It was a dreary, not to say ghastly existence for four young things in the first two years of the ’teens, yet these two pairs of Coggs twins — that was their unmusical last name — managed to have bright color, laughing eyes and gay spirits on their unwholesome fare, badly prepared, and the sound sleep they tumbled into on their forbidding beds. But how long this lively health and jollity would hold out under such conditions was a question.

“ Hullo ! ” Daisy said, as the younger pair came in, half an hour after she and Maizie had returned. “ Anything ? ”

This was the shorthand manner of demanding the day’s news.

“ Say, we’re right in it ! ” announced Taizie. “ Haze — ”

“ I’ll tell my own news ! ” interrupted Hazie. “ Got a rise ! What d’you know about that ! ”

“ Oh, say ! Honest ? ” cried Maizie and Daisy together.

Hazie nodded hard. “ Fifty cents per,” she affirmed. “ Go ahead, Taizie.”

“ Mine ain’t so much, ’cause it ain’t steady, like

Hazie’s, but a woman where I took a grand dancingdress home to-day give me a dollar. That ain’t so worse, either.”

“ Well, I just guess not!” cried Maizie, who was recognized for some unknown reason as the head of the family. “ It makes you get one-third more this week than your wages ! ”

“ How’d you get that so easy?” asked Taizie admiringly. “ I counted up myself and got that, too, but not right off the bat, like you. Sometimes I’m dead sure you’ll get rich, Maizie Coggs, you’re that quick ! ”

“ Say, I guess there’s a streak o’ Coggs luck on tap,” said Daisy. “ I found a nickel in a crack in the store floor to-day. But I blew it in on one of those fortune teller little green birds with a bill on ’em like a hook nose. There was a dago woman had ’em on the sidewalk. And that little green feller walked right along — hitched along the stick they sat on — and pulled out a card for me. I had to hand it back, but it told on it I was going on a journey. And it had a piece on it, too. It said :

“ Keep your heart up and your pluck,

You are born to wealth and luck ;

There’s a grand man and a true,

Who will live and die for you.”

Daisy recited this bit of choice doggerel with emphasis on all the insignificant words, reducing it to sing-song.

“ Great fortune ! ” said Maizie scornfully. “ All the wealth that’d give you would be funeral expenses for the man. About the best thing you could do with that bird’d be to use him for Thanksgiving dinner/’

“ Well, I’d rather go to the movies than spend five cents I found on a bird that didn’t have any more for his money than that piece,” added Taizie. “ I bought ten cents’ worth of potato salad at the della cattessen with ten cents out of my dollar. The man said, being it was night and folks had bought supper, he’d give me over. And he did. Look at here ; the wooden dish’s heaped — fifteen cents’ worth, every bit of it.”

Taizie produced her contribution to the family wellbeing with triumph, conscious of being a good sister in sharing her luck, and of having made a good bargain.

The four girls bustled around and got supper. Taizie’s potato salad held the position of honor on the table. They set the other end of the table, leaving the gas stove attached and using the lamp, because they were heating water to add to the coffee and to wash dishes later on. They economically set away the coffee pot with the grounds from breakfast to be used again at night.

For the rest, their supper consisted of bread, soused mackerel, a box of small ginger cookies, so hot that their ginger must have been mixed with cayenne pepper, while their surfaces looked like a physical geography map.

These four girls, who were hardly more than children, earned, between them, fourteen dollars a week, but when rent comes out of that, and food and clothing for four hard-working, growing girls, there isn’t much to spare. There had been one horrible time when Hazie was ill and there was nothing saved up. It was a time spoken of, even by these irrepressible, jolly girls, with lowered voices and quick-coming gloom in their laughing eyes. When Hazie was better, and the first and worst consequences of her illness survived, Maizie had declared that there must be a sick fund established, something laid by each week to meet emergencies, and the rule had been rigidly adhered to. There are not many pennies in fourteen dollars with which to do so much, so meals were necessarily frugal.

They were merry meals, nevertheless. The double twins loved one another devotedly. They told one another the history of each day, recounted all their adventures, burlesqued every one and everything that had amused them, sang the latest sonig, if one girl had heard a new one, were funny, clever, gay. They had such good times that their laughter rang out in the gloomy flat, and made their dingy neighbors envious, wistful, or happy, according to the dispositions of the people hearing the noise in “ the Coggs’ room.” To-night it was Taizie who was chief entertainer. It often was Taizie; if there was one of the double twins livelier, better at acting and singing than the others, it was this one of the second pair.

Taizie leaned back in her chair, gesticulating with a bread crust.

“ When we’re rich, just richer’n oil, I’m going to have a car like I saw to-day,” she announced. “ It was redder’n’ shinier’n a bottle in a drug store, ’nd had stripes on it, green stripes with a gold edge to ’em, an’ glass 1 Siay, maybe it didn’t shine — brass, too ! ”

“Well, Taizie Coggs,” protested Hazie. “I saw that, too; it’s a cigar thing! I guess I wouldn’t have a tobacco car ! I’ll have one of the great long, sneaky kind you can’t hear till you’re hit; you hear it going by after you’re dead. Mine’ll be dark red, outside, and inside cushions just the same color. And I’ll have a bonnet all made of flowers sewed on solid, and a veil that’ll fly till you’d think it was one end on me and the other end over in Brooklyn. And the way I’ll sit up and take notice’ll give you a fit. You’ll all be along, but if one of you acts as if she cared when we meet a circus procession, she’ll be sorry! I ain’t going to act ’sif I thought one bit more of that car and riding ’round with other folks walking than if I was a marble bust.”

“Well, Hazie, what’s got the matter with you?” cried Daisy. “ When we say what it’ll be when we’re rich we don’t make it like that, not ever ! It’s all fixed that we’re just going to have the biggest time ever, and make everybody else have it, too, but we ain’t going to do any stiff ramrod acts. I’m going to ride along nodding till they’ll all say I’m crazy, just to show I ain’t forgetting — ” Daisy ended with a wide gesture embracing the entire room. Her sentence needed no words to declare what it was she meant to remember when she was prosperous.

“ Oh, I got kind of a jolt to-day,” said Hazie, with heightened color. “ There’s a girl at Madame’s thinks she’s got first prize in the cattle show. Taizie was out; she got smarty-cat. I sort of thought a nifty car like that giddy one I saw, spattering a little mud on her would be about my size — for a change.”

Maizie shook her head. “ No good, Hazie,” she said kindly. “No good, and no go. It’s straight fun for ours, no pickles! When we get rich we’ll take her out in our car, but we won’t get grouchy before or after. Land, everybody can’t be decent; there’s millions, four or five, in New York! I don’t know as I’ll have a car. I kind of think maybe I’ll get a movingpicture theatre of my own and a merry-go-round and look at movies free half the day and go around on the horses the other half.”

It was one of the chief joys of these two sets of twins to plan nightly what they would do when they were rich. It began to seem to them like a settled fact that one day they were to be removed from their poverty and have all the desires of their hearts gratified.

“ We’ll practise riding the merry-go-round now,” said Taizie.

Whereupon she turned her chair sidewise to the table, mounted it as if it had been a saddled horse, and jogged and jarred around the room. With a hoot of rapture her own particular twin followed on her chair. Maizie and Daisy promptly fell into line and in a moment there was a pandemonium of four pairs of wooden feet violently striking the floor in alternation with four more pairs of wooden feet, all propelled by four pairs of human feet which seemed to be a part of four riotous young human voices, all shrieking with laughter and exploding into meaningless words.

It was not strange, with all this noise going on, that knocking at the door was not heard. It repeated itself many times before Hazie cried :

“ Hark ! I hear something ! ” and the chair steeds stood still.

Then the knock, recognizing the sudden silence as intended to give it a chance, fell once more on the panel of the dark door.

“ Houlihan ! ” cried Maizie. It sounded like an exclamation, but she meant it for- an announcement of her next door neighbor.

“ Come in! ” cried Daisy, getting off her chair; the other three twins also stood.

To their boundless surprise and consternation the door opened and revealed a thin, dark-haired, darkeyed man, irreproachably clad, who removed his hat from a head so smooth and glossy that it looked like metal, and said to the panting girls :

“ A're these the Misses Coggs? ”

“ We’re the Coggs twins, two pairs,” said Maizie after a pause, obeying the visible pokes of her sisters to make her speak.

“ I thought so,” said the stranger, blandly unconscious of the rapid, but useless smoothing which the girls were giving their brilliant and tousled hair, the blank shock written on their faces. “ Miss Mary Coggs, Miss Margaret, the elder twins, if I am not mistaken; Miss Teresa and Miss Hazel, the younger, I think. If you please, I should like a few words with you. I have something that is of the utmost importance to you to lay before you.”

“ Have a chair,” said Daisy, recovering herself to a degree.

The visitor seated himself on Daisy’s steed, now restored to its proper office. The four twins also seated themselves. As there were but four chairs Taizie turned up a box and sat on that. They all pulled their skirts down over their knees with precisely the same motion, and regarded the stranger with a gravity that held fear and curiosity.

“ Now that I see you more plainly I find that it

1HEY . . . REGARDED 1HE STRANGER WITH A GRAVITY THAT HELD FEAR AND CURIOSITY.”

j oh<^ would be impossible for a stranger to tell you apart; not only that, but to decide which was the elder, which the younger pair of twins. You are wonderfully alike/’ he said.

“ There’s ways of telling after you’re used to us,” said Maizie. “ But we’re awful much alike, I know.” She spoke apologetically.

“ My name is Carberry, Henry Keane Garberry. I am a lawyer, and I want you to consider me one of your friends, my dears,” the twins’ visitor introduced himself.

The girls pricked up their ears, especially Maizie and Taizie. This sounded interesting to all four of the girls, but it sounded more than that to Maizie and Taizie. Not for nothing had they gone to vaudeville theatres in the cheapest seats of the topmost gallery. They knew that wildly exciting events in plays began in this way, by the coming of a lawyer whom no one knew, but who introduced himself in words similar to those used by Mr. Carberry.

None of the girls spoke or moved; they sat regarding their caller with alert and strained attention, listening for what he should say next with much the air with which a cat listens at a mouse’s hole.

“ My dear twice-told twins, if I may so call you, what do you know about your mother?” Mr. Carberry asked. “ What was her name before she married?”

All four tawny heads shook at once. Maizie replied for them all.

“We don’t know what her name was. We don’t know hardly anything about her. She died when that pair was fourteen months old, couldn’t walk yet, and we was just a little more’n two, Daisy and me. So we don’t know who she was. Our father died when that pair of twins wias two months old. His name wais Coggs. We was taken to be raised by a woman. She was poor, but she took all of us, meanin’ to raise us to work. She died two years ago, so all she got out of it was the bother. She wasn’t so bad ; we was sorry she died on us, but we got along.” Maizie told this brief history calmly, indicating the younger pair of twins with a nod at them when they appeared in it.

“ And how it happened that the Society for the Protection of Children did not get hold of you and put you into the proper hands to complete your bringing up, is a mystery ! ” exclaimed Mr. Carberry.

“ Well, we didn’t mean they should,” cried Maizie. “ A woman — she hires this flat — said she’d look after us; I guess the Society wasn’t on. Say, you belong to it ? ” Maizie broke ofif with a look of terror which was reflected on the three other twin faces.

“ And if I did, what then? ” asked Mr. Carberry.

“ Oh, for goodness’ sake ! When we’ve got along good so far, don’t, oh, please, please don’t butt in and send us off into ’sylums, shut us up ! We’re all right, honest to goodness, we are ! ” cried Maizie in a panic.

“Yes, honest to goodness, we’re getting on fine! ” echoed Taizie, with equal appeal.

“ Don’t be alarmed, double twins,” laughed Mr. Carberry. “ I am not an agent for the Society; I am not even a member of it. I came here to-night to tell you that your mother was Mary Margaret Debbs before she married William Coggs, who was an Englishman and your father.”

“ Then she named the first pair after her. Haw’d you find out? ” cried Taizie.

“ I am a lawyer, and it is part of a lawyer’s practice to find out facts of this sort. A trifle that came to light in connection with other business gave me the first clue to your parentage. Since then I have followed up the clue and worked it out to complete and important results. Your mother’s father is old Peter Debbs, who owns large, prosperous mills at Chagford Falls, Massachusetts. He is immensely wealthy, at least twice over a millionaire; he is childless, your mother was the only child he had that lived to grow up. He was a poor man when she was about your present age and she left home to earn her living, married and was lost to him. He never knew what had become of her. My efforts have given me these facts. I have been working on the case for months; it is complete now, and it is time that you were told that your grandfather is found and is a man of great wealth.” Mr. Carberry told this amazing story without enlarging upon its plot; indeed the mere facts were so stunning that he could not have heightened their effect. He closely watched the four young faces before him to see their expression when his story had filtered into the double twins’ consciousness.

Maizie, Daisy, Taizie and Hazie turned fiery red with a flush that ran up into their tawny, frowzy hair and seemed to increase its reddishness.

Taizie deliberately arose and executed a walkaround in a small circle before her chair, head on one side, her face absurdly grave. Then she sat down again.

“ Well, what — do — you — know — about — that ! ” exclaimed Daisy in a stunned way.

“ Are we — what d’you call ’ems? Tl?e folks that come in for money? ” asked Hazie.

“ Yes, that’s it ! ” Maizie said. “ Does this old man who’s rich somewhere know about us ? Do we — are we in it? What’s next? Anything doing for the Coggs twins ? ”

Mr. Carberry saw the anxiety in her face, heard it in her voice, recognized that her questions sounded flippant only because she did not know how to ask them in any other than slang terms. They represented Marzie’s sense of responsibility, and a dawning realization that something might be expected of these fantastic twins as heirs to great wealth.

“ Your grandfather, Peter Debbs, has been seen, Miss Maizie,” Mr. Carberry replied. “ I am obliged to tell you that he has not been enthusiastically pleased to hear that he had grandchildren. The proofs laid before him are enough to convince any man, but he is slow to admit them. You see, Mr. Debbs lacks education and is old. People of that sort are hard to move.”

“ Most folks are,” said Daisy, with the wisdom born of experience far beyond her years. “ Most everybody is as stuffy as a stone when you first try to make ’em do anything.”

“ That is often true,” agreed Mr. Carberry politely. “ At any rate, your grandfather is what is called ‘ set in his ways.’ He has to have time to accept the surprising news of your existence. He is supposed to be looking into the proofs which I have laid before him. There is no getting away from them. You certainly are his grandchildren, and, sooner or later, he must acknowledge you.”

“ If he does a-college us, or whatever you said, what happens next?” demanded Maizie.

“ I think there is no doubt that he will be persuaded to settle upon you a considerable sum of money, in order to allow you to live, and be fitted to live, in a manner suitable to four young ladies who will be the heirs to immense wealth,” said Mr. Carberry. “ Mr.

Debbs does not strike me as a generous, nor an affectionate person, but, I fancy, he has a sense of justice. If not, public opinion, if not the law, would compel him to provide properly for the children of his sole child, the only creatures of his own blood now living.”

“ Gee ! ” exclaimed Taizie under her breath, not flippantly, nor slangily, but in a fervent way, as if the syllable were almost a prayer.

“ Every word you say is dead easy, but it kind of goes along so smooth that it’s hard understanding/’ said Maizie candidly. “You mean that we’ll get enough to keep us till this man — grandfather — dies ? Not that I want him to die; I’m just asking.”

“ Enough to live on and to be educated, so that when all Mr. Debbs’ wealth comes to you, you’ll be ready to use it,” said Mr. Carberry.

“ Oh, say ! ” cried Daisy, too stirred for further utterance.

“ I’d like to know if you ever heard the like ? ” demanded Taizie, growing dangerously purple, from emotion. “ Most every night we say what’ll happen when we get rich and here’s you, coming here — What’d we have for supper, girls? Would you mind setting that alarm clock upside down, so when you’re gone we’ll know you was here and we didn’t fall asleep and dream you, Mr. Carb? ”

“ I’d like to know how we could dream a Peter Debbs and a — something — Falls we never heard of,

Taizie?” demanded Hazie, as Mr. Carberry laughingly did as Taizie requested and reversed the clock.

“ Then what do we do now ? ” asked Maizie.

“ I think it would be well for you to go to Chagford Falls, to be there, near your grandfather,” said Mr. Carberry, resuming his seat after he had stood the clock on its folded-down top ring. “ It would be convenient to have you at hand when he is ready to acknowledge you. If he were not willing to do so, it would be best to have you there, on the other hand, to bring the weight of public opinion on him by letting his own townspeople know his granddaughters.”

“Is it far?” asked Maizie. “And how’d we live there while we was waiting? We’ve got work here.”

“ The journey takes about five hours by train. It was my idea that you should get employment in the mills at Chagford Falls while the matter was hanging. I am glad to see that you are prudent, Miss Maizie, though you are so young, and evidently impulsive,” said Mr. Carberry kindly.

“ Maybe they wouldn’t give us a job,” suggested Hazie.

“ They would, though,” returned Mr. Carberry. “ I have made sure of that. The overseer is ready to take you on, all four of you, when you appear. When could you go ? ”

“ Well, we couldn’t walk off and not give the people we work for a chance,” said Maizie. “ Of course there’s dead loads of girls ready to jump in, but you’ve got to get ’em. We could start Monday, I s’pose. We don’t get a chance to save up much. What’s it cost to go? Should we sel'l our stuff?” Maizie made a gesture toward the almost bare room.

“ I think it would be wise,” said Mr. Carberry without a smile. “If you please, I will lend you the money for your journey; you may return it when you can.”

“ Thank you,” said Maizie doubtfully. “ Say — I’ve got to find out, you know — what’s in this for you? Will you get paid for finding us — or what? ”

Mr. Carberry looked smilingly at this young creature of fifteen whose knowledge of life made her know that he could not be acting from entirely disinterested motives.

“ You are right to find out, Miss Maizie,” he replied. “ I shall get back all and more than I lend you. I shall be paid for finding you, yes. I expect to make a nice sum for my work, so you need not be afraid that I am too good to be true. It is entirely in the way of business, as to my part of it, though I am sincerely glad to set four such brave, pleasant little girls on the road to luck.”

This answer satisfied Maizie. She drew a long breath of relief.

“ That’s good,” she said frankly. “ I guess you took hold of us something like a ticket in a raffle. If it draws, all right; if you lose, grin and bear it!

That’s straight, and now I don’t mind standing in with you. I kinder hate charity, and I wouldn’t of liked you to do work hunting us up if you wouldn’t get a good bit for it. I guess it’s a go, is it, girls ? ”

“ Sure,” said Taizie. “ If we all get a job in the mills down there, wherever ’tis, we’ll get on. I’d like to go travelling. We never went anywheres further’n the Bronx, and you go there on a trolley, not a train,” she added, explaining to Mr. Carberry.

“ Besides, it’s spring, and it would be kinder swell to go off to the country,” said Hazie. “ Is it country?”

“ Chagford Falls is a small town; it is country in comparison to New York, yes,” said Mr. Carberry. “There is one more twin to be heard from?” He looked at Daisy.

“ Well,” began Daisy slowly. “ New York’s good enough for me, and that’s the truth. But you don’t get so awful much of the good-enough when you hustle out every morning to work and tie up bundles all day, with a bottle light hanging over your nose, and hustle back here at night to eat and go to bed. I say, let’s gamble on this grandfather and risk going where you send us, though we don’t know you, and maybe you’re sending us off to a frankforter factory, to get ground up, instead of to some mills to work.”

“ Daise ! ” cried Maizie, somewhat shocked.

“ That’s all right, Miss Maizie. I don’t in the least mind your twin’s frankness,” laughed Mr. Carberry. “ My dear little girl, I have a daughter nearly as old — or as young ! — as you. I would not send you into danger; you will not find the * frankforter factory ’ where the mills should be ! At the worst, you would be better off in Chagford Falls than here in this darkness and hard work for small pay. But I think that there is no doubt that in a short time you are to be wrapped in luxury and find the wildest dreams you ever dreamed come true. You are going-to be healthy, wealthy and wise in no time! Healthy and wise you are now, sound, rosy girls, with keen wits and common sense, I’m glad to discover. And old Peter Debbs’ grandchildren will be wealthy. So take this step in the dark without fear but that it will lead straight out into sunshine.”

Mr. Carberry arose as he spoke and shook hands with each of the double twins in turn. “ I’ll attend to the arrangements for your journey; I’ll see you again,” he said.

The two pairs of twins bade him good-by with unwonted seriousness on their short, rosy faces.

For a moment after he had gone they remained silently and soberly regarding one another. Then Taizie emitted a whoop that might almost have reached the ears of Peter Debbs in Chagford Falls, Massachusetts.

“ Rich ! Us rich ! Oh, clams, and shoot the chutes ! What do you know about that! ” she cried.