Chapter 3

kitchen, doing the same errand many times, finding herself doing always something different from that she had set about doing. The molten day was burning itself out like a fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the earth, but the woman who waited felt chilled to the marrow, and took a cloak down from a peg and wrapped it about her while she waited for the biscuit to bake. At supper they sat down together, the man and his wife and their three children. The children were in fine spirits from the fun they had had that afternoon. Never had daddy been so nice to them. He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so well that she had caught the cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had played he was a buffalo and had charged them all with his head down, till they screamed in terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and once mother started up and cried:

“What’s that?”

She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called after her:

“Don’t you know the cowards better than that? They’ll wait for nightfall.”

But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.

“Jim,” said his father, before they went to bed, “remember you are the man of the family.” But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to bed.

The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of horses’ feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband’s face with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.

“Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am going to fasten up the house.”

“Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put into:

“Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by fastening that?”

“Jim, I must,” and her voice broke. “They may think you are not here, that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is fastened.” She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe.

“Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her than from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.

Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway hither and thither. Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows gaping wide for them? And then, as one who walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key. Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him. One of the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond. Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat. One by one she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to wait.

“What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters.

“You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?” she reproached him.

“’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from the kids?” He smiled at her bravely. “The remembrance of what we’re anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands, either. This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality since it’s got to be a State.”

“Sh-sh-sh!” she said. “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water, or is it—” They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping of a ship’s screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question. The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but the sound was unmistakable. She put her arms about the man’s neck and crushed him to her with all her woman strength. “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a good man to me!”

“Steady—steady.” He strained her close to him. “They’d be, by the sound of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we’ll hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.”

His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to him, dazed.

“They’re sober, all right enough.”

“How do you know?”

“They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”

The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch about a stone’s-throw from the door. Not a word was said either within or without. The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there was no whispering, no deferring to a leader. On they came, so close that Jim and Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles. There was the clank of spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted, then some one knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.

Jim could feel the thudding of Alida’s heart as she clung to him, but when the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim and went on her knees close to the outer wall.

“Jim, is that you?” she called, and now every sense was trained to battle; her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been suddenly roused.

“That won’t do at all, Miz Rodney. We know you got Jim in there, just as certain as we’re out here, and we want him to come out and we’ll do the thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences.”

Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture. There was a sleepy, fretful cry from the room beyond—the noise had roused one of the children.

“Sh-sh, dear,” she called. “It’s only a bad dream. Go to sleep again; mother is here.”

Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without, drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath of air in the suffocating room. Jim bent towards Alida:

“I’m goin out to ’em. They’ll do it square, over on the cotton-woods; this rumpus’ll only wake the kids.”

But she shook her head imploringly, putting her finger to her lips as a sign that he was not to speak, and he had not the heart to refuse, though knowing that she made a desperate situation worse.

“Gentlemen”—she spoke in a low, distinct voice—“Jim ain’t here. He’s been away from home five days. There’s no one here but me and the children; you’ve woke them up and frightened them by pounding on the door. I ask you to go away.”

“If he ain’t in there, will you let us search the house?” It was Henderson that spoke, Henderson, foreman of the “XXX” outfit.

“I can’t have them frightened; please take my word and go away.”

“Whas er matter, muvvy?” called Judith, sleepily. Young Jim was by this time crying lustily. Only Topeka said nothing. With the precocity of a frontier child, she half realized the truth. She tried to comfort little Jim, though her teeth chattered in fear and she felt cold in the hot, still room. Then Judith called out, “Make papa send them away.”

“Your papa ain’t here, Judith.” But the fight had all gone out of Alida’s voice; it was the groan of an animal in a trap.

“Where’s papa gone to?”

“Sh-sh, Judith! Topeka, keep your sister quiet.”

It was absolutely still, within and without, for a full minute. Then Alida heard the shoving of shoulders against the door. Once, twice, thrice the lock resisted them. The brown bureau spun across the room like a child’s toy. The lynchers, bursting in, saw Alida with her arms around Jim. When the last hope had gone it was instinct with her to protect him with her own body.

“Go into the kids, old girl, this is no place for you.” And there was that in his voice that made her obey.

Something of the glory of old Chief Flying Hawk, riding to battle, was in the face of his grandson.

“Remember, the children ain’t to know,” he said to his wife; and to the lynchers, “Gentlemen, I’m ready.”

XIX. “Rocked By A Hempen String”

Alida heard the mingled sounds of footsteps and hoofs grow fainter on the trail. The children looked at her to tell them why this night was different from all others—what was happening. But she could only cower among them, more terrified than they. She seemed to be shrunken from the happenings of that day. They hardly knew the little, shrivelled, gray woman who looked at them with unfamiliar eyes. Alida gazed at the little Judith, and there was something in her mother’s glance that made the little one hide her face in her sister’s shoulder. Young Judith it was who all unwittingly had told the lynchers that her father was at home, and in Alida’s heart there was towards this child a blind, unreasoning hate. Better had she never been born than live to do this thing!

It was the wee man, Jim, who first began to reflect resentfully on this intrusion on his slumbers. He had been sleeping well and comfortably when some grown-ups came with a lot of noise, and his father had gone away with them. It had frightened him, but his mother was here, and why should she not put him to sleep again?

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf.’” And as she paid no heed, but looked at him, white-faced and strange, he again repeated, with his most insinuating and beguiling tricks of eye and smile:

“Muvvy, sing ‘Dway Wolf’ for Dimmy.”

The child put his head in his mother’s lap, and Alida began, scarce knowing what she did:

“‘The gray wolves are coming fast over the hill, Run fast, little lamb, do not baa, do not bleat, For the gray wolves are hungry, they come here to kill, And the lambs shall be scattered—’

No, no, Jimmy, muvvy cannot sing. Oh, can’t you feel, child? Judith, Judith, why were you ever born?”

It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet? Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer bellowed in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert. A hush not of earth nor air nor the things that were of her ken seemed to have fallen about them, muffing the dark loneliness as by invisible flakes. The children had crouched close together for comfort. They feared the little, gray-faced woman who seemed to have stolen into their mother’s place and looked at them with strange eyes.

Jimmy looked at the woman who held him, hoping his mother would come, and he could see them both. And while he waited he dropped off to sleep; and little Judith, hiding her head on Topeka’s shoulder, that she might not see the look in those accusing eyes, presently dreamed that all was well with her again; and Topeka reflected that if her mother should ask her in the morning whether she had dreamed last night, she would have a fine tale to tell of men riding up, and loud voices, and trying of the door, and father going away with them. Her mother had questioned her this morning when nothing had happened to warrant it. Surely she would ask again to-morrow, and Topeka could tell—she could tell—all.

Alida looked at her three sleeping children—his children, and yet they could sleep. Into her mind came that cry of utter desolation, “Could ye not watch with me one hour?” And God had been deaf to Him, His son, even as He was deaf to her.

The children were sleeping easily. The hush that had hung like a pall over the valley had not lifted. Had they done it? Was it over yet? She went to the door and listened. Surely the silence that wrapped the valley was a thing apart. It was as no other silence that she could remember. It was still, still, and yet there was vibration to it, like the muffled roar within a shell. She strained her ears—was that the sound of horsemen going down the trail? No, no, it was only the beating of her foolish heart that would not be still, but beat and fluttered and would not let her hear. Yes, surely, that was the sound of hoofs. It was over then—they were going.

She would go and look for him. Perhaps it would not be too late—she had heard of such things. A dynamic force consumed her. She had no consciousness of her body. Her feet and hands did things with incredible swiftness—lighted a lantern, selected a knife, ran to the corral for an old ladder that had been there when they took possession of the deserted house; and through all her frantic haste she could feel this new force, as it were, lick up the red blood in her veins, burn her body to ashes as it gave her new power. She felt that never again would she have need of meat and drink and sleep. This force would abide with her till all was over, then leave her, like the whitened bones of the desert.

It was dark in the valley, but the menacing stillness seemed to be lifting. The range-cattle had again taken up their plaint, the sounds of the desert night swept across the stony walls of the cañon. Alida knew that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods. There were no other high trees about for miles. Again she listened before advancing. There was no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly. They had gone their way into the valley. She ran swiftly, her lantern throwing its beam across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for her there was no need of its beacon. To-night she was beyond the halting, stumbling uncertainties of tread to which man is subject. There was magic in her feet and in her hands and brain. Like the wind she ran, the wind on the great plain where there are no foot-hills to hinder its course. The black, dead trees stood out distinctly against the starry sky, and from a cross-limb of one of them dangled something with head awry, like a broken jumping-jack, something that had once been a man—and her husband. She could touch the feet of this frightful thing and feel its human warmth. A wind came up from the desert and blew across the cañon’s rocky walls into the valley, and the parody of a man swayed to it.

She had been expecting this thing. For weeks the image of it had been graven on her heart. Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his dangling body from the cross-limb. Yet with the actual consummation before her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected. At sight of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings of that day went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the rope, that she had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers, dangling from her nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again and again she called to the dead man for help, called to him as she had been accustomed to call when her woman’s strength had been unequal to some heavy household task.

Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer, and mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the horse to greater speed in the shrill cabalistic “Hi-hi-hi-ki!” of the plains-man. What was it—one of them returning to see that she did not cheat the rope of its due?—to hang her beside him, as an after-thought, as they hanged Kate Watson beside her man? Let them. She was standing near the swaying thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside her, and what was left to her of consciousness made out that the rider was Judith. She pointed to it, and stood helpless with the dangling rope in her hand.

“Are we too late?” Judith almost whispered, as she caught Alida’s cold, inert hands. “I dreamed it all and came. If I could have dreamed it sooner!”

Alida did not seem to hear, neither could she speak. She only pointed again to the thing beside her.

Judith understood. The women had a task to share, and in silence they began it. The lynchers had done their work all too well. Again and again the women strove with all their strength to take down the dangling parody of a man, which in its dead-weight resistance seemed in league with the forces against them. At last the thing was done. Down to a pale world, that in the haggard gray of morning seemed to bear in its countenance something of the pinch of death, Judith lowered the thing that had so lately been a man. She cut the rope away from the neck, she straightened the wry neck that seemed to wag in pantomimic representation of the last word to the lynchers. They’d have to reckon with him on dark nights, and when the wind wailed like a famished wolf and when things not to be explained lurked in the shadows of the desert.

The morning stillness came flooding into the cup-shaped valley like a soft, resistless wave. Something had come to the gray, old earth—another day, with all its human gift of joy and woe, and the earth welcomed it though it had known so many. The sun burst through the gold-tipped aureole of cloud, scattering far and wide lavish promises of a perfect day. The earth seemed to respond with a thrill. No longer was the pinch of death in her countenance. The valley, the mountains, the invisible wind, even the dead cotton-woods, seemed endowed with throbbing life that contrasted fearsomely with the terrible nullity of this thing that once had been Jim Rodney.

Alida had ceased to take any part in the hideous drama. She sat on the ground, a crouching thing with glittering eyes. It was past comprehension that the sun could shine and the world go on with her man dead before her. Judith had become the force that planned and did to save the family pride. While her hands were busy with preparations for the dead, she rehearsed what she would say to this and that one to account for Jim’s absence. The silence of the men who had done this thing would be as steadfast as their own.

And there were the children. Through all her frantic search for things in the house, Judith remembered that she must step softly and not waken the children. With each turn of the screw, as her numbed consciousness rallied and responded afresh to the hideous realization of this thing, there came no release from the tyrannous hold of petty detail. She remembered that she must be back at noon to hold post-office, and there would be the endless comedy to be played once more with her cavaliers. They must never suspect from word or look of hers. And there was the dance to-night at the Benton ranch—she hid her face in her hands. Ah, no, she could not do this thing! And yet they must not suspect. She must contrive to give the impression that Jim had cheated the rope. Yes, she must go and dance, and, if need be, dance with his very murderers. Jim’s children were to have the “clean start” that he intended, and they would have to get it here. There was no money for an exodus and a beginning elsewhere.

Alida still crouched beside the long, even tarpaulin roll that Judith had prepared with hands that knew not what they did. But now Judith gently roused her and put in her hand a spade; already she herself had begun. But Alida stared at it dully, as if she did not understand. Then Judith pointed to something black that had begun to wheel in the sky, wheel, and with each circular swoop come closer to the roll of tarpaulin. Then Alida knew, and, taking the spade, she and Judith began to dig the grave.

XX. The Ball

The dance in the Benton ranch was the great social event of the midsummer season. The Bentons had begun to give dances in the days of plenty, when the cattle industry had been at its dizziest height; and they had continued to give dances through all the depressing fluctuations of the trade, perhaps in much the same spirit as one whistles in the dark to keep up his courage. Thus, though cattle fell and continued to fall in the scale of prices till the end no man dared surmise, the Benton “boys”—they were two brothers, aged respectively forty-five and fifty years—continued to hold out facilities to dance and be merry.

All day strange wagons—ludicrous, makeshift things—had been discharging loads of women and children at the Benton ranch, tired mothers and their insistent offspring. To the women this strenuous relaxation came as manna in the wilderness. What was the dreary round of washing, ironing, baking, and the chain of household tasks that must be done as primitively as in Genesis, if only they might dance and forget? So the mothers came early and stayed late, and the primary sessions of the dances fulfilled all the functions of the latter-day mothers’ congresses—there were infant ailments to be discussed, there were the questions of food and of teething, of paregoric and of flannel bands, which, strange heresy, seemed to be “going out,” according to the latest advices from those compendiums of all domestic information, the “Woman’s Pages” of the daily papers.

Inasmuch as these more than punctual debaters must be cooked for, there was, to speak plainly, “feeling” on the part of the housekeeper at the Bentons’. Wasn’t it enough for folks to come to a dance and get a good supper, and go away like Christians when the thing was over, instead of coming a day before it began and lingering on as if they had no home to go to? This, at least, was the housekeeper’s point of view, a crochety one, be it said, not shared by the brothers Benton, whose hospitality was as genuine as it was primitive. To this same difficult lady the infants, who were too tender in years to be separated from their mothers, were as productive of anxiety as their elders. A room had been set apart for their especial accommodation, the floor of which, carefully spread with bed-quilts and pillows, prevented any great damage from happening to the more tender of the guests; and they rolled and crooned and dug their small fists into each other’s faces while their mothers danced in the room beyond.

By nightfall the Benton ranch gleamed on the dark prairie like a constellation. Lights burned at every window; a broad beam issued from the door and threw a welcoming beacon across the darkness and silence of the night. The scraping of fiddles mingled with the rhythmic scuffle of feet and the singsong of the words that the dancers sung as they whirled through the figures of the quadrille and lancers. About the walls of the room where the dancing was in progress stood a fringe of gallants, their heads newly oiled, and proclaiming the fact in a bewildering variety of strong perfumes. Red silk neckerchiefs knotted with elaborate carelessness displayed to advantage bronzed throats; new overalls, and of the shaggiest species, amply testified to the social importance of the Benton dance.

As yet the dancing was but intermittent and was engaged in chiefly by the mothers with large progeny, who felt that after the arrival of a greater number of guests, and among them the unmarried girls, their opportunities might not be as plentiful as at present. One or two cow-punchers, in an excess of civility at the presence of the fair, had insisted on giving up their six-shooters, mumbling something about “there being ladies present and a man being hasty at times.” In the “bunk-room,” which did duty as a gentleman’s cloak-room, things were really warming up. There was much drinking of healths, as the brothers Benton had thoughtfully provided the wherewithal, and that in excellent quality.

Costigan was there, and Texas Tyler, who had ridden sixty miles to “swing a petticoat,” or, if there were not enough to go round, to dance with a handkerchief tied to some fellow’s sleeve. By “swinging a petticoat” it was perfectly understood among all his friends that he meant a chance to dance with Judith Rodney. Year in and year out Texas never failed to present himself at the post-office on mail-days, if his work took him within a radius of fifty miles of the Daxes. No dance where the possibility of seeing Judith was even remote was too long a ride for him to undertake, even when it took him across the dreariest wastes of the desert. Texas had been devoted to Judith since she had left the convent, and sometimes, perhaps twice a year, she told him that she valued his friendship. On all other occasions she rejected his suit as if his continual pressing of it were something in the nature of an affront. Yet Texas persevered.

“Well, here’s lukin’ at you, since in the way of a frind there’s nothing better to look at!” and Costigan drained a tin cup at Texas Tyler.

“Your very good health,” said Texas, who was somewhat embarrassed by what was regarded as Costigan’s “floweriness.”

“Begorra, is that Hinderson or the ghost av the b’y?” Costigan’s roving eye was arrested by the foreman of the “XXX,” who stood drinking with two or three men of his outfit. He was pale and ill-looking. He drank several times in succession, as if he needed the stimulant, and without the formality of drinking to any one. The two or three “XXX” men who were with him seemed to be equally in need of restoratives.

They talked of the cattle stampede in which several of the outfits had been heavy losers. Some nine hundred head of cattle had been recovered, and members of the different outfits were still scouring the Red Desert for strays.

Something in the nature of a sensation was created by the arrival of the Wetmore party. The women were frankly interested in the clothes, bearing, and general deportment of the New-Yorkers. Rumors of Miss Colebrooke’s beauty were rife, and there was a general inclination to compare her with local belles. Such exotic types—they had seen these city beauties before—were as a rule too colorless for their appreciation. They liked faces that had “more go to them,” was the verdict passed upon one famous beauty who had visited the Wetmores the year before. In arrangement of the hair, perhaps, in matters of dress, the judges were willing to concede the laurels to city damsels, but there concession stopped. But evidently Kitty, to judge from the elaboration of her toilet, did not intend to be dismissed thus cursorily. She herself was delicately, palely pretty, as always, but her hair was tortured to a fashionable fluffiness, and the simplicity of her green muslin gown was only in the name. It was muslin disguised, elaborated, beribboned, lace-trimmed till its identity was all but lost in the multitude of pretty complications.

“Did you know that old Ma’am Yellett had a school-marm up to her place?” asked one of the men, apropos of Eastern prettiness.

“Well, well,” Costigan reminisced, “’tis some av thim Yillitt lambs thot’s six fut in their shtockings, if Oi be rimimbering right. Sure, the tacher ought to be something av a pugilist, Oi’m thinkin’.”

“I seen her the other day, and a neater little heifer never turned out to pasture. Lord, I’d like to be gnawing the corners of the primer right now, if she was there to whale the ruler.”

“Arrah,” bayed Costigan, “but the women question is gittin’ complicated ontoirely, wid Miss Rodney—an’ herself lukin’ loike a saint in a church window—dalin’ the mails an’ th’ other wan tachin’ in the mountains. Sure, this place is gittin’ to be but a sorry shpot for bachelors loike mesilf.”

“I ain’t mentionin’ no names, but there’s a man here ain’t treatin’ a mighty fine woman square and accordin’ to the way she ought to be treated.”

The information ran through the circle like an electric shock. Men stopped in the act of pledging each other’s healths to listen. Loungers straightened up; every topic was dropped. The man who had made the statement was the loose-lipped busybody who had suggested to his host that he give up his six-shooter since there were “ladies present.”

“What the hell are you waiting for?” queried Texas Tyler, savagely. “You’ve cracked your whip, made your bow, and got our attention; why the hell don’t you go on?”

The man looked about nervously. He was rather alarmed at the interest he had excited. The next moment Peter Hamilton had walked into the room. There was something crucial in his entrance at this particular time; it crystallized suspicion. The gossip took advantage of the greetings to Hamilton to make his escape. Texas Tyler left the bunk-room immediately and looked for him in the room with the dancers. The fiddles, in the hands of a couple of Mexicans, had set the whole room whirling as if by magic. As they danced they sang, joining with the “caller-out,” who held his vociferous post between the rooms, till the room was full of singing, dancing men and women, who spun and pirouetted as if they had not a care in the world. But Texas Tyler was not of these, as he looked through the dancers for his man. There was a red flash in the pupils of his eyes, and he told himself that he was going to do things the way they did them in Texas, for, of course, he knew that the loose-lipped idiot had meant Judith Rodney and Peter Hamilton. Never before had such an idea occurred to him, and now that it had been presented to his mind’s eye, he wondered why he had been such a blind fool. Never had the singing to these dances seemed so absurd.

“Hawk hop out and the crow hop in, Three hands round and go it ag’in. Allemane left, back to the missus, Grande right and left and sneak a few kisses.”

He rushed from the room and down to the stable. At sight of him some one leaped on a horse and rode out into the darkness.

“Who was that?” asked Texas of a man lounging by the corral.

“That was—” and he gave the name of the loose-lipped man.

Texas cursed long and picturesquely. Then he went back to the bunk-room and tried to pick a quarrel with Peter Hamilton, who good-naturedly assumed that his old friend had been drinking and refused to take offence.

Peter went in to ask Kitty to dance with him. All that evening he had been waiting anxiously for Judith. Meanwhile he had used all his influence as a newly appointed member of the Wetmore outfit to soothe the ruffled feelings of the cattle-men. Of the tragedy in the valley he had heard no rumor.

Kitty had come to the point where she was willing to waive the Récamier-Chateaubriand friendship in favor of one more personal and ordinary. In fact, as Peter showed a disposition to regard as final her answer to him on the day he had spurred across the desert, Kitty, with true feminine perversity, inclined to permit him to resume his suit. His acquiescence in her refusal she had at first regarded as the turning of the worm; after the wolf-hunt, however, her meditations were more disturbing. She had never told Peter of that strange woodland meeting with Judith, yet Judith’s beauty, her probable hold over Peter, the degree of his affection for her were rankling questions in Kitty’s consciousness. In the stress of these considerations Kitty lost her head completely for so old a campaigner. She drew the apron-string tight—attempted force instead of strategy.

Kitty and Peter finished their waltz, one of the few round dances of the evening.

“How perfectly you dance, Kitty! It’s a long time since we’ve had a waltz together.”

The cow-punchers looked at Kitty as if she were not quite flesh and blood. Such flaxen daintiness, femininty etherealized to angelic perfection, was new to them, but their admiration was like that given to a delicate exotic which, wonderful as it is, one is well pleased to view through the glass of the florist’s window.

Peter was deferentially attentive and zealous to make the Wetmore party have a thoroughly good time, yet he did all these things, as it were, with his eye on the door. He was not obviously distrait; he was the man of the world, talking, making himself agreeable, “doing his duty,” while his subconsciousness was busy with other matters. It was rather through telepathy than through any lack of attention paid to her that Kitty realized the state of things, and in proportion to her realization came a feeling of helplessness; it was so new, so unexpected, so cruel. He seemed drifting away from her on some tide of affairs of the very existence of which she had been unconscious. Further and further he had drifted, till intelligible speech no longer seemed possible between them. They said the foolish, empty things that people call out as the boat glides away from the shore, the things that all the world may hear, and in his eyes there was only that smiling kindness. How had it come about after all these years? What was it that had first cut the cable that sent him drifting? What was it? She must think. Oh, who could think with that noise! How silly was their singing as they danced, how uncouth!

“All dance as pretty as you can, Turn your toes and left alleman; First gent sashay to the right, Now swing the girl you last swung about, And now the one that’s cut her out, And now the one that’s dressed in white, And now the belle of the ball.”

The dancers seemed bitten to the quick with the tarantula of an ecstatic hilarity; their bodies swayed in perfect harmony to the swing of the fiddles and the swell of the chorus. The most uncouth of them came under the spell of that mad magic. Their movements, that in the beginning of the dance had been shy and awkward, became almost beautiful; they forgot arms, hands, feet; their bodies had become like the strings of some skilfully played instrument, obediently responsive to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing brought some of the poetry of his own far land. The scene was amazing in its beauty and simplicity, like the strong, inspirational power and rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel. One by one the dancers glowed with better understanding; discordant elements, alien nations were fused to harmony in this vivid picture.

Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth of it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on her lips a pale, tolerant smile.

“Aren’t they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of worries, but would you suspect it? They’re just the women for this country.”

Now in the present state of affairs almost any other subject would have been better calculated to promote good feeling than the one on which Peter had alighted. Kitty’s thoughts had perversely lingered about one who, though not one with these women, had yet their sturdy self-reliance, their acquiescence in grim conditions, their pleasure in simple things. Kitty’s apprehension, slow to kindle, had taken fire like a forest, and by its blaze she saw things in a distorted light; her present vision magnified the relations of Peter and Judith to a degree that a month ago she would have regarded as impossible. “He is her lover!” was the accusation that suddenly flashed through her mind, and with the thought an overwhelming desire to say something unkind, something that should hurt him, supplanted all judgment and reason.

“Oh, it’s a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And an artist, of course—but isn’t it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize them because they are having a good time? There’s no virtue in it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you praise them for coming to.”

“I’m afraid you find us and our amusements a little crude. Evidently the spirit of our dances does not appeal to you; but I did not suppose it necessary to remind you that they should not be judged by the standard of conventional evening parties,” said Peter, hurt and angry in his turn.

“Us, our amusements, our dances? So you are quite identified with these people, my dear Peter, and I had thought you an ornament of cotillions and country clubs. I can only infer that it is somebody in particular who has brought about your change of heart.”

Peter flushed a little, and Kitty kept on: “Some of the native belles are quite wonderful, I believe. Nannie Wetmore tells of a half-breed who is very handsome.”

Peter set his lips. “At the expense of spoiling Nannie’s pretty romance, I must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the most beautiful of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room. It would be as ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to her as it would to—well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the question at a woman’s club—‘Was Joan of Arc a lady?’” Peter spoke without calculating the conviction that his words carried. He was angry, and his manner, voice, intonation showed it.

Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by Peter’s ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang that gnawed her little soul: “I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I did not, of course, know that this young woman was anything to you.”

“Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I’ve never had a better friend than Judith Rodney.”

The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies, with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs. Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own interpretation—barbaric, passionate, rude, but magnificently vivid. And the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie’s train.

The “XXX” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others. The rest of the “XXX” party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable. They were still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The “caller-out,” stationed between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax’s feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic into his bowing, José’s fiddle rioted with the madness of it.

Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might evade the stigma of “cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give credence to the tale of Jim’s escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn the pittance that would give the children the “clean start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music, the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers, magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping, clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild rhythm of Miguel’s fiddle, and young José’s bow capered madly.

Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-lust of the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur; the dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson as he danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead trees, and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze like a pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him to his camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel’s fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney’s face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney’s face, refined, sharpened, tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney’s face! Henderson could not withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the midst of the dancers like a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his eyes as if to brush away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms and rushed from the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel’s bow stopped with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for an explanation of Henderson’s sudden panic, but all was dark without on the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of drapery that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air. “What was it?” the dancers asked one another in whispers.

And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them. There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in her eyes something of Mary’s look, as she turned from Calvary. The dancers still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms about their partners’ waists, the women stepping forward; they were like the painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some word was due from him to explain his terror of a moment ago.

“Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the window.”

“A ghost that’s ready to dance.” She held out her hand to him. In her gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading the meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect replica of the dead man’s, looked at him.

“I bring you greeting from my brother,” she said. “He has gone on a long journey.”

Henderson started. Through the still room ran the murmur, “Rodney’s outwitted them; he’s played a joke on the rope!” And Judith, his dare-devil sister, had come with his greetings to Henderson, leader of the faction against him! The tide had turned. The applause that is ever the meed of the winner was hers to command. The cattle faction were ready to sing the praises of her splendid audacity. In their hearts they were glad in the thought that Jim had outwitted them.

Miguel’s bow dashed across the strings, and he drew from the little brown fiddle music that again made them merry and glowing. The magic came back to the dance, the blood leaped again with the merry madness, and they swept to the bowing like leaves when the first faint wail of winter cries in the trees.

Hamilton, standing apart with Kitty Colebrooke, had been a dazed witness of the scene. With the rest he had watched the entrance of Judith, had been stunned by the change in her appearance, had seen her triumph and heard the rumor of Jim’s escape, and his heart had warmed with the good word. She had probably managed the plan, and had come to-night, in the joy of her triumph, to hurl in their faces that she had outwitted them. And she had paid the penalty of her courage—her face told that. What a woman she was! Her heart would pay the penalty to the last throb, and yet she could dance with the merriest of them. And as she danced she seemed to Peter Hamilton, in her white draperies, like a cloud of whirling snow-flakes drifting across the silence of the desert night. She was the one woman in all the world for him, though his blind eyes had faced the light for years and had not known it. He had squandered the strength of his youth in the pursuit of a little wax light, and had not marked the serene shining of the moon.

“And a man there was and he made his prayer—” he quoted to himself. Well, thank God that it had not been answered. He would take her away from here. She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on his choice. His family, his friends—he winced at the thought of their possible reception of the news. But Judith’s presence would adjust these difficulties. He would present her to Kitty now, that his old friend might see what manner of woman she was. Kitty, he felt, would be kind in memory of the old days. She would give to them both in friendship what she had denied him in love. And as he warmed to the thought he turned to the woman of his youth. And she read a look in his face that had not been there in a long time. Had he, then, come back to her? Was the distance from bark to shore lessening as the sea of misunderstanding diminished?

“Kitty, we were speaking a moment ago of Miss Rodney. You would like to know her, I’m sure. We’ve been such good friends all these years while you were deciding that what I wanted was not good for us—and deciding wisely, as I know now. Look at her! You’ll understand how she has helped me keep the balance of things. When she’s finished dancing you’ll let me bring her to you, won’t you?”

And Kitty, who had expected much different words, struggled with the meaning of these unexpected ones. The strangeness of the pain bewildered her. Her dazed consciousness refused to accept that Peter was asking permission to present to her a woman whom she thought should not have been permitted to enter her presence. There was about her a white flame of anger that seemed to lick up the red blood in her veins as she turned to answer:

“She is undeniably handsome, Peter, but I do not care to meet your mistress.”

He bowed low to her as Lieutenant Swift, of Fort Washakie, who was of the Wetmore party, came to claim Kitty’s hand for the next dance. Judith and Henderson were leading the last figure, their hands clasped high in an arch through which the dancers trooped in couples. Again and again he tried to catch Judith’s eye, but her glance never once met his. Her great, wide eyes had a far-away look as if they saw some tragedy, the shadow of which would never fall from her. She was, indeed, the tragic muse in her floating white drapery, the tragic muse whose grief is too deep for tears. He watched her as she swept towards him in the figure of the dance, the head thrown back, slightly foreshortened, the mouth smiling with the smile that knows all things, the eyes holy wells of truth. He saw in her something of the tenderness of Eve, for all the blending of the calm modern woman, capable in affairs, equal to emergency. It was like her to contrive her brother’s escape and then to dance with the very men who had knotted the noose for his hanging. Henderson was bowing to her, the dance was over, and the next moment she was alone.

“Is it you, Peter?” She thrust a strand of hair back from her temple. Her eyes rested on him for a moment, then wandered, till in their absent look was the rapt expression of the sleep-walker. The dark-rimmed eyes had in their depths the quiet of a conflagration, and Peter, seeing these things, and knowing the gamut of all her moods, saw that he had been mistaken. She had not come, to dance in triumph, in the face of her brother’s enemies. There was no triumph in her face, but white, consuming despair.

“Did you ask me to dance?” Again she put back the strand of hair. “Forgive me for being so stupid, but I’ve kept post-office to-day, and had a long ride, and I danced with Henderson.”

He drew her arm within his and led the way out through the crowd of dancers to the star-strewn night. She did not speak again, nor did she seem to notice that they had left the room with the dancers. She turned her face towards the lonely valley, where the drama of her brother’s passing had been consummated, and something there was in her look as it turned towards the hills that told Peter.

“Tell me, Judith, ‘what has happened?”

For answer she pointed towards the valley. “They did it last night at the dead cotton-woods. Henderson led them. I could not stay with Alida. I had to come here to dance that no one might suspect.”

Her voice was steady, but low and thrilling. In its deep resonance was the echo of all human sorrow. There was no hint of accusation, yet Peter felt accused. He felt, now when it was too late, that his position had been one of almost pusillanimous negligence. From the beginning he had taken a firm stand against violent measures. He had talked, argued, reasoned, inveighed against violence; no later than a week ago he had ridden across the desert to tell Henderson that the Wetmore outfit would take no part in violence of any sort, and that the cattle outfit that did resort to extreme measures would miss the support of the “W-Square” in any future range business. But it had not been enough. He should have made plain his position in regard to Judith. With her as his future wife the tragedy of the valley would not have been possible.

From the ranch-house came the swell of the fiddles, the rhythmic shuffle of feet, the song of the dancers, dulled by distance. Beside him was Judith, a white spirit, the woman in her dead of grief. And yet, through all the grim horror of the tragedy she remembered the part that had been allotted to her, threw all the weight of her personality on the side of the game she was playing.

“You must be on our side, Peter, and when there is talk of Jim’s absence you must imply that he is East somewhere. You will know how to meet such inquiries better than we women. Henderson will be only too glad. You should have seen the wretch when I held out my hand to him and told him to dance with me. He came, white and shambling; we have nothing to fear from Henderson. Alida has no money to go away with. She and I must stay here and make a beginning for the children, and, Peter, we want you to help us.”

He had no voice to answer her brave words for a minute, and then his sentences came uncertain and halting.

“You must think me a poor sort of friend, Judith, one who has been blind till the eleventh hour and is then found wanting. I feel so guilty to you, to your brother’s wife, to that little child who put out his arms so trustfully to me that night, but I never imagined that things would come to such a pass as this. The smaller cattle outfits have been doing a good deal of blustering, but the more conservative element supposed that they had them in check, and did not for a moment think that they would take the law into their own hands. Believe me, this lawlessness has been in the face of every influence that could be brought to bear, and it shall not go unpunished.”

She spoke to him from the darkness, as the spirit of grief might speak. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is the justice of the plains. But, Peter, it is but poor justice. What’s done is done, and fresh violence will not give back Alida her husband nor the little ones their father. What we need is friends, one or two loyal souls who, though knowing the hideous truth of this thing, will stand by us in our pitiful falsehood. I have told no one, nor shall I, but you and—Peter, you must not laugh at your fellow-conspirator—Leander.”

He took her hands in his and pressed them; big hands they were, and hardened by many a homely task, but withal tender and with the healing quality of womanliness in the touch of their warm, supple fingers. But to-night she did not seem to know that he held them, nor to be conscious of his presence. The woman in her was dead of grief. The white spirit in her place, that plotted and planned that Jim’s children and Jim’s wife might not from henceforth walk in the shadow of the gallows, was beyond the prompting of the flesh. And again she spoke to him in the same far-away voice, with the same far-away look in her eyes.

“You must know, Peter, that Leander is at heart of the salt of the earth. I told him about it all, and he asked to be given the commission to deal with the men. He has risen to his post magnificently. I heard him swear the wretches to secrecy, hint to them that he had a great story to tell them. They were frightened, and listened. And the poor little man that we have so despised told them convincingly how Jim had made good his escape—even Henderson half believes we saved him.”

Peter hoped that she would accuse him of his half-heartedness indirectly, if not openly. It would have made his conscience more comfortable, and his conscience troubled him sorely to-night. It was that fatal habit of procrastination that had brought this thing about. He had hesitated all these weeks about Judith, and while he had threshed out the pro and con of her disadvantageous family connection, this hideous tragedy had happened.

“Peter”—and now her eyes seemed to come back to earth again, to lose something of the far-away look of the sleep-walker—“Peter, I’m cruel to speak to you of these things now. When your heart is full of your own happiness, I come to you like a dark shadow with this tragedy. But I am glad for the good that has come to you, Peter. Perhaps Miss Colebrooke told you of the day I met her in the wood, the day of the wolf-hunt. She was so beautiful, I understood—”

“Judith, I hardly know how to say what I am going to, I feel that I have been such a bad friend to you, but you must hear me patiently. Together, if you are willing, after knowing all of me that you do, we must look after your brother’s children. That night in the little house in the valley, when the little chap came to me, don’t you remember, there was something fine and fearless in the way he did it. ‘You may belong to the cattle side of the argument,’ he seemed to say, ‘but I trust you.’ Now, Judith dear, that boy’s faith in me is not going to be shaken. We must look after them together. It is a very little thing you have asked of me, my dearest, but a very big one that I am asking of you. Do you understand, my Judith, it is you that I want? Don’t think of me as I have been, Judith, but as you are going to make me. I want you to give me the right now, this evening, to share all this trouble with you. Do we understand each other, Judith? Is it to be? And will you come back with me now, into the room where they are dancing, and let me present you to them, to the Wetmores, as _my_ Judith, my betrothed?”

“But, Peter, I don’t understand. I—I thought you and Miss Colebrooke were—”

“That’s all over, Judith. I did love her once. Oh, you dear, brave woman, I’m not a hero from any point of view, and you know it. It’s but a sorry lover that’s making his prayer to you, my dearest; but you won’t judge, I know, beloved, you will love me instead?”

Judith turned towards the valley. Her whole being throbbed with a passionate response to the man who stood so humbly before her, but there were duties that came first. Her mind was full of Alida and her children, and her eyes still sought Peter’s imploringly.

“You will be a good friend to them, Peter—to Jim’s people? I cannot talk to you of anything else to-night. Your heart is big, Peter, but you cannot feel, perhaps—”

“Listen, Judith. Whatever friendship and protection I can give your family you may count upon from now till the end of time. I will be theirs as I am yours. I feel your grief, but I want to soothe it, too. And if you love me, and I feel, Judith, that you do, you must let them all see to-night, these people who know us both, that we stand together before all the world for better or worse. Think, Judith, and you will see that you owe it to yourself, to me, to all these men, who reverence you as the one woman, the one ideal in their lonely lives.”

She could not speak. The moment was too full, the strain had been too great; but she smiled surrender, and Peter caught her tenderly in his arms and kissed her once—his Judith she was now, his heroine. Then, without another word, he drew her arm through his and led her back to the lights, where the dancers still held high carnival.

Judith’s half-sister, Eudora, was making a pretty quarrel by perversely forgetting the order in which she had given her dances. The girl was so undeniably happy that Judith dreaded the grim news she must tell her. Eudora blushed as she encountered Judith’s eye. Her half-sister ever offered a check on Eudora’s exuberant coquetry, with its precipitation of discussions that often ended in bullets. Leander stood on the outermost fringe of Eudora’s potential partners. He would not have dared to maintain it openly, yet he was sure the pretty minx had promised that dance to him.

“Dance with Leander, dear, and don’t let those men begin quarrelling. I’ve something to tell you, presently,” said Judith.

Texas Tyler stood glowering at them from the doorway. He would not catch Judith’s eye as she tried to speak to him. Kitty sat alone for the moment. She had sent the young lieutenant to fetch her a cup of coffee, but as Peter approached with Judith she averted her eyes.

“Kitty, may I present to you my fiancée, Miss Rodney?”

Kitty rose superbly to the situation. She might, indeed, have made the match she was so overjoyed in the good-fortune of her old friend Peter. She made no reference to the woodland meeting—she hoped for the happiness of seeing them in town. And she bade Peter tell the good news to Nannie Wetmore, they would be so glad. Nannie swallowed a grimace and proffered a cousinly hand. She had suspected some such news as this when she saw that things were not going well with Kitty and Peter.

“Better one dance with a good partner that can swing ye than several with a feeble partner that leaves ye to swing your own corners!”

Judith looked up, smiling. She recognized the characteristic utterance of her old friend Mrs. Yellett. The matriarch had sustained a breakdown, and arrived, in consequence, when the dance was half over, but she was philosophical, as always, in the face of misfortune, and loudly attested her pleasure in the renowned pedal feats of her partner, Costigan.

Behind came Mary Carmichael, looking brown and happy. From the attitude of the group around Judith and Peter Mary divined what had happened, and came to add her congratulations. Even Mrs. Yellett forgot to choose an axiom as her medium of expression, and kissed Judith publicly, with affectionate unction. Henderson had effaced himself, and Leander, proud of his triumph and Judith’s commendation, sat in a corner and smiled contentedly. Ignorant of the drama to which they had played chorus, the dancers still riotously swung one another up and down the length of the room, and from the little brown fiddles came the gay music of Judith’s betrothal.

THE END