Split "took a dare" the first time she mounted Baldy Bob's coach. She climbed up to the driver's high seat in front with as much hidden trepidation but as unhesitatingly as she would have plunged down a shaft, to show Sissy, who was a coward, how brave her sister was. But after she got up there, Sissy faded out of the world. In Baldy Bob's coach Split was seized with _Wanderlust_. She sat erect and still up there in front, her hands clasped in her lap, her shining eyes averted from the motionless tongue below and fixed on the unrolling landscapes of the world; on plains and valleys, on villages nestling in trees and flying past, on great rolling fields of grain--perhaps a smooth, light, continuous sort of sage-brush, wrinkling in the wind as the sunflowers seem to when one looks up at the mountain from the sluice-box. Yet with the advent of Frances into this strange game of rapt silences there came a change. Frank's imagination did not tempt her abroad strange countries for to see; she merely wanted to ride down and off the platform. "Make it go, Split," she begged, with a trust in her big sister's capacity that Split would have perished rather than admit to be unfounded. "Will you hold on tight?" she asked Frances. The child nodded, grasping the dashboard firmly. With the ease of long practice, Split got to the big wheel and leaped to the ground. She had noticed the big stone which Baldy Bob had slipped in front of the hind wheel, and she fancied it was part of the reason why the stagecoach could not be moved. She was mistaken: it was the whole reason. And when Split had pushed and tugged and kicked with all her strength, laying herself flat at last and bracing her toes against the other wheel to get a leverage, her first feeling when she saw the coach move above her head was of delight at the unexpected. Her second was of unmixed terror; for, gaining an impetus from its descent on the inclined plane that led from the platform, the coach rattled briskly down Sutton Avenue, headed for the canon, with Frank clutching the dashboard and laughing aloud in glee. Split Madigan had always fancied she could run. She never knew how impotent human fleetness is till she saw that lumbering coach go plunging swiftly and more swiftly away from her, across B Street, and tearing down the next hill with a speed that made her puny efforts laughable. Baldy Bob, emerging from the saloon on the corner with that feverishly distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing so long promised. If it had been morning, he would have been properly afraid of getting in the way of the monster let loose. But in the evening Bob was accustomed to the occurrence of peculiar things. So he ran--at that time of day he could run better than walk--out to the middle of the street, threw up his arms, and called hoarsely upon the mad thing to stop.