When Mrs. Orville Platt had been Terry Sheehan she had played the piano, afternoons and evenings, in the orchestra of the Bijou theatre, on Cass street, Wetona, Wisconsin.  Any one with a name like Terry Sheehan would, perforce, do well anything she might set out to do.  There was nothing of genius in Terry, but there was something of fire, and much that was Irish.  The combination makes for what is known as imagination in playing.  Which meant that the Watson Team, Eccentric Song and Dance Artists, never needed a rehearsal when they played the Bijou.  Ruby Watson used merely to approach Terry before the Monday performance, sheet-music in hand, and say, “Listen, dearie.  We’ve got some new business I want to wise you to.  Right here it goes ’Tum dee-dee dum dee-dee tum dum dum.  See?  Like that.  And then Jim vamps.  Get me?”

Terry, at the piano, would pucker her pretty brow a moment.  Then, “Like this, you mean?”

“That’s it!  You’ve got it.”

“All right.  I’ll tell the drum.”

She could play any tune by ear, once heard.  She got the spirit of a thing, and transmitted it.  When Terry played a march number you tapped the floor with your foot, and unconsciously straightened your shoulders.  When she played a home-and-mother song that was heavy on the minor wail you hoped that the man next to you didn’t know you were crying (which he probably didn’t, because he was weeping, too).

At that time motion pictures had not attained their present virulence.  Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the ubiquitous film.  The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes.

Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semi-professional tone.  The more conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance.  There never had been an evil thing about Terry, but Wetona considered her rather fly.  Terry’s hair was very black, and she had a fondness for those little, close-fitting scarlet velvet turbans.  A scarlet velvet turban would have made Martha Washington look fly.  Terry’s mother had died when the girl was eight, and Terry’s father had been what is known as easy-going.  A good-natured, lovable, shiftless chap in the contracting business.  He drove around Wetona in a sagging, one-seated cart and never made any money because he did honest work and charged as little for it as men who did not.  His mortar stuck, and his bricks did not crumble, and his lumber did not crack.  Riches are not acquired in the contracting business in that way.  Ed Sheehan and his daughter were great friends.  When he died (she was nineteen) they say she screamed once, like a banshee, and dropped to the floor.