Part 19

Owing to the scarcity of the gentler sex, it had been decided that no one "set" was to be blessed with more than one girl. Thus they would go around better. Molly, glancing across at her rival, saw that she was surrounded by a laughing group of men. The woman was joking broadly at each, wriggling her white shoulders, darting side glances, half promising, half denying. In a moment the group broke, and the members of it rushed in her own direction. They were already quarrelling for places in her set. The matter was arranged somehow after much wrangling. Then, too late, Molly saw that the other woman had scored again. Bismarck Anne had not only selected her partner, but also the other six members of the set. Thus she had made seven men happy and none jealous.

A Western dance is a sight worth seeing. The musicians call off the figures. The head fiddler does it until his voice gives out. Then the second fiddler and the accordion take a try at it, after which further calling is unnecessary owing to the fact that most of the dancers are very drunk. This comes to pass because, at the end of each dance, all are supposed to visit the bar. The most heinous crime, next to horse stealing or sluice robbing, is "shying drinks" at such times. As some men can hold more than others this enforced equality of quantity consumed brings about unexpected variation in the hilarity of the consumers, all of which adds to the variety of the occasion.

The interims between drinks are occupied by square dances. The men go through some set of monkey shines which they call figures, the principal object of which seems to be at once the tripping up of such male and the prolonged squeezing of such female dancers as they may come into intimate personal relations with on their grand rounds, which is conducive to hilarity of the loud-mouthed variety. The exercise itself is rather violent, and as the room is low, lit by lamps, and comparatively windowless, the air soon becomes heavy with the reek of perspiration and the fumes of tobacco. The floor acquires a heaving motion and the lights sway back and forth. The homeliest of the dance-hall girls somehow looks like a fairy through the haze--a rather elusive fairy, with a rather heavy unfairylike gait. At this period there is usually a good deal of noise. Then all at once it is morning, and somehow the scene has changed to the ravine, and there is a tomato can poking itself into the small of the back.

Molly tripped gracefully and easily through the figures of the opening dance, seeming scarcely to touch the floor. Bismarck Anne leaned heavily on each man in the swing, and pressed her bosom against his arm. Twice she half slipped and caught by the shoulder of her partner of the moment, and her breath was hot against his throat. She said not one word the whole dance through.

With the last quaver of the fiddle came the harsh command--

"S'lute yore pardners! All promenade to th' bar!"

They obeyed. The sets went in two by two, the men treating their masculine partners with humorous politeness in the matter of assistance in crossing the sill of the door. The non-dancers crowded after them in a confused mob.

At the bar Frosty had the drinks all ready on the back shelf. Black Mike assisted him, and together the two, their sleeves rolled back and their faces glistening with the sweat of honest toil, passed over brimming little glasses of "forty rod" and jingled two-bit pieces into the drawer. Bismarck Anne drank with the best of them, leaning familiarly against the men nearest her, bandying jokes that were more than doubtful. Molly sat on her corner of the bar but did not drink.

At the beginning of the next dance the aspect of things was a trifle changed. A bigger crowd gathered about Bismarck Anne soliciting places in her set, and it was more familiar. Some one snatched a kiss of her. She merely laughed and pushed him away. There seemed to have suddenly sprung up between them and her a _camaraderie_ in which Molly had no part, as though they and the newcomer had some secret to keep to themselves which thrust the younger girl without the circle.

Cheyenne Harry did not come near her again. He seemed wholly fascinated by the stranger. The sight of his attentions to the other aroused Molly. A bright red spot burned in either cheek. She was all animation. Her laughter rang true, her eyes flashed with merriment. For every one she had a joke, a half-tender, half-sympathetic aside. She saw that as long as they were in her actual presence the men were wholly hers. And yet she felt too the subtle growth of this other woman's influence, and realized that eventually it would beat her down. In spite of her brave appearance her throat choked her. Only by a great concentration of the will could she prevent herself from lapsing into silence, and then into tears. As the strain began to tell on her nerves, the old feeling of unknowable guilt came to oppress her heart, and with it a growing longing to get away, to hide somewhere; to begin all over again humbly, below the lowest; to claim nothing, to attempt nothing, to do nothing in opposition to that accusing Thought which seemed greater than herself. All at once she was tired of struggling. She was ready to give up this life, if only they would let her feel like something besides a breathless naughty child, fearfully expecting every moment the grave reproving voice of the Master.

She chided herself for this. It was not game. Pluck she admired above everything; and yet here she was, ready to run away at the first taste of defeat. She smiled ravishingly on Dave Kelly, until he began to speculate on the possibility of repeating that delicious experience which Peter had so inopportunely cut short.

As the evening progressed, the "forty rod" began to show its effects. Williams had to have the full width of the floor whenever he tried to walk, and his enthusiastic imitations of an angry catamount were most creditable. Some one was always disgustedly repressing him. Several others were in like condition with different symptoms. The soberest manifested increased vigor of limb and fertility of imagination. A happy combination of these two effects brought about the proposal of a turkey walk. A ring was formed on the instant.

Into the ring two men, chosen _viva voce_, were pushed. They began at once to strut back and forth like turkey cocks in the spring. They hollowed their backs in, stuck their chests and rumps out, slapped their thighs, toed in, puffed their cheeks, ducked their heads, uttered sundry gurgling whoops, and hopped about, first on one foot, then on the other in a charmingly, impartial imitation of a Southern cake walk and a Sioux Indian war dance. These performances tickled the crowd immensely. When it came to noisy vote on the relative merits of the performers, it vociferously shouted unanimous approval of all. Therefore the contest was pronounced a tie. At this moment Dave Williams staggered forward. His muddled brain had room for only the most evident facts. He saw the ring and his drunken shrewdness had retained cognizance of the evening's rivalry. He mixed the two ideas up to effect a proposal.

"Hyar," he shouted, "lesh do this ri'! I secon' Bismarck Anne!" He let out a wild-cat yell--"Whe-ee!! Two t' one on Anne!"

Some one hit him on the chest and sent him staggering backward. He gyrated unevenly toward the corner, stumbled over his own feet, and sat down heavily on the floor, where after feeling vainly for his gun he relapsed into good humor. But his suggestion hit the popular fancy.

The idea ran like fire. In a second the ring was formed again. Those in front knelt; those behind looked over their shoulders. Even Frosty and Black Mike deserted the bar and stood leaning in the doorway. The girls were urged forward into the ring, which closed after them, and the music was ordered to proceed.

Bismarck Anne walked calmly into the circle and stood looking about her. Molly had an instant of doubt. Then a revulsion against her easy surrender got her to her feet and into the ring. The gauntlet was down. She would accept the challenge. It was a duel.

There was a moment's squabble between two self-appointed officials in regard to precedence. It was settled, and Molly was beckoned to begin. The fiddles started up a squeaky, lively air to which the men kept time with hands and feet. The young girl, her cheeks burning, stepped into the centre of the ring and struck the first graceful pose of the _cachucha_, learned years before at the Agency from a little Mexican serving-maid. The men recognized it in a swift quickly silenced burst. The fiddles changed their measure to suit the dance.

The _cachucha_ is a beautiful dance when rightly done. It is a combination of airy half-steps, sinuous body movements, and slow languorous and graceful weavings of the arms. It has in it all the enchantment of the lazy South. There is not an abrupt movement in it, but one pose melts into another as imperceptibly as night into day. Molly did it well. Her supple figure was suited to it, and the very refinement of her actions enhanced the charm of the dance. The men applauded vehemently when she stopped. The other woman laughed aloud in scorn.

With a final sweeping curtsy the dancer turned to go. The flush of triumph and excitement burned on her cheeks and in her eyes. Finding the ring solidly closed so that exit was impossible, she accepted a seat on the knee of one of those in the front rank. The man put his arms around her and drew her close in a drunken embrace, which the girl only half noticed.

Bismarck Anne sprang to the centre of the ring at one bound, the sneer still on her lips. She turned abruptly to the musicians.

"Quit that damn stuff!" she snarled. "Play somethin'!"

The musicians hurriedly swung into a lively air.

Bismarck Anne's dance was not especially graceful. It consisted mainly of high kicks and a certain athletic feat known as the split. But it was magnificent in its abandon, and fierce in the crude animal energy of it. Besides its mere suggestiveness and appeal to the passions, it had too a swing, a fire, a brute-like force which could not but hit to the hearts of men at bottom strong, crude, and savage. They went crazy. They shouted encouraging things at her with open straining throats. They stamped and cheered until the lights wavered. They clapped each other delightedly on the back. And Bismarck Anne danced ever the more furiously. She kicked with enthusiasm, with abandon, holding her short skirts still higher to gain the greater freedom. The tiger-lily fell from her head and was snatched up almost before it touched the floor. Her heavy black hair came down, and hung in strands across her face, and fell in vivid contrast upon her white shoulders and her heaving bosom. She shook it back with a savage movement.

And she in the corner, who was nothing but a woman, with little of the savage in her to appeal to savage men, and, for all her independence, little of this bold reckless spirit of the frontier in her to appeal to pioneers, felt herself growing sick and faint as she saw these greater forces slipping beyond her control roaringly, as would a mountain torrent. Her rule was over, and this woman's had begun. The room swayed before her eyes. Some one behind her handed a brimming glass of whisky over her shoulder, and she seized it eagerly and gulped it down.

The unaccustomed stimulant cleared her vision. The room stood still, the different objects in it became distinct. She looked on the whirling figure of the woman in the centre, the open-mouth turmoil-stirred crowd in the background, with dispassionate eyes. She was deadly cool. To her memory came Graham's words of that same afternoon. "_Because you are too good for them!_" She remembered the very emphasis of his tone. Well, he was right, and yet not right. She had been too good for them, but she world show them now! With the sudden flash of resolve, the first unnatural hardening effect of the whisky passed, and in a whirl the exhilaration came. She laughed and responded convulsively to the man's embrace.

Bismarck Anne gave a final kick, and fell in some one's open arms. The men, shouting frantically, began to stir preparatory to regaining their feet. Then they sank back again with a fresh cheer. Into the centre of the ring Molly tripped unsteadily, and stood for a moment looking about her with uncertain foolishly smiling eyes. Her cheeks were a glow of red. She glanced toward the musicians, and, with the tip of her fingers, raised her dress to her knees, waiting for the music to begin.

The room was deadly still. She could see, looking at her excitedly, all the men she had met and come to know in the last year. She saw them dimly, as through a haze. Would the music never begin? What were they waiting for? A draught blew cold along the floor. She felt it on her legs. Why was it? Oh, yes, she was holding her skirts up to dance, to show them that she was no better than this woman, Bismarck Anne.

And then the black cloud that had been gathering so long, the undefined guilty feeling at nothing, broke over her. She wanted to go on--the music had begun now--but she could not. Twice she tried. Something held her, something real, something stronger than herself. She did not recognize them, these ancestral voices, but they laid upon her their commands. She dropped her skirts, and covered her eyes with her two hands, and burst through the ring of men, and ran out through the night to her own cabin, where she threw herself on her bed weeping bitterly. She was ashamed.

XXXI

LAFOND'S FIRST CARD

Lafond, in the meantime, had left the dispensation of drinks almost entirely to Frosty. He darted here and there in the crowd, a light of unwonted excitement in his eye.

"That thar Mike's shore waked up," commented Old Mizzou. "Never see him so plumb animated. He shore looks nutty. Dance halls is mostly too rich fer his blood, I reckon."

But Tony Houston and Jack Snowie and a dozen others by now knew better than to attribute this excitement to dance halls. Lafond possessed in his pocket a copy of Knapp's dismissal, and he had told them of it.

He told them of it mysteriously, in half-limits, pointing out tendencies and solutions to what they already knew, leaving them to draw deductions, sowing anxieties that there might spring up a harvest of distrust.

Through the woof of gayety he rapidly ran a dull thread of angry suspicion. Men made merry, and forgot all the past and all the future. Other men talked low-voiced in corners, and tried, from the distraction of drink and gayety, to draw clear plan and reflection. And always Lafond took other men aside and whispered eager little half-confidences, and went on quickly to the next.

His spirit was upheld by a great excitement, such as it had never experienced before, not even in his early and adventurous days. He seemed to himself to be mounting higher and higher on the summit of a great wave of luck, as a swimmer is lifted by the sea. And yet, behind it all, again for the first time in his life, he felt a portent in the air. It was as though the wave were rearing itself, only to curl over and break upon the shore. He laid this to nervousness, and yet it affected him with a certain superstitious awe.

So occupied was he, that he quite missed the girl's sudden exit, and was drawn from his brown study only by the sudden hush that succeeded it. In the silence a drunken voice uplifted itself loudly.

"M' work 'sh done," it vociferated. "I wan' m' pay!"

Everybody turned, prepared to laugh at this "comic relief!" Jack Snowie was addressing Billy Knapp. Billy at once became conscious of an audience, and the usual desire to appear well seized him. He smiled with the good-humored tolerance of a drunken man.

"I suppose you want me to take it right out of my pants pocket, eh, Jack?" he inquired paternally. "Of co'se you wants yo' pay! Come around in th' mornin' an' get it." He smiled again at the group that surrounded him. It appeared to be listening to this colloquy with unusual interest.

"I wan' m' pay!" reiterated Snowie sullenly, but then apparently lost the thread of his ideas and lurched away. Billy considered the incident closed. He was mistaken. The group did not dissolve; it came closer. The men had a strangely unfriendly look about the eyes. Billy did not understand it. He stepped toward one side of the circle about him. It closed the tighter to keep him in.

"What's the joke, boys?" he asked, still smiling.

The room was breathlessly still. Many of those within it did not understand the trouble, but trouble was in the air. Across a wavering line of heat could be dimly discerned the musicians, poised to start the next dance, but uncertain whether or not to begin. They did not begin. The silence was startled even by Peter's doggy yawn from the far corner of the saloon proper.

"Ain't no joke!" "That's what we want to know!" "Damned poor joke!" "You'll find out soon enough!" cried the men angrily, and then paused and looked at each other because of the jostle of words that meant nothing.

Billy flushed slowly, and his jaw settled into place.

"I'm jest as willin' to play 'horse' as anybody," he said, trying to find calm utterance; "and if this is a joke, I wishes some fellow-citizen to let me in. But, damn it!" he cried in a burst, "don't you get too funny! What the hell does you-all want me to do to carry out this yere witticism, anyway?"

The coolest and most determined looking man in the group made two steps across the floor, and confronted Billy squarely. At this evidence of earnestness, Billy lost his excitement and became deadly cool.

"Oh, it's you, Tony Houston, is it! Do you want your pay too?"

"Yes, I do," replied the man, "and I'm going to have it."

"Well," said Billy, "here's a pretty-lookin' outfit! Snowie was drunk, but this gang 's sober enough to know better, anyway. You come around to my office in the mornin', and I pays the bunch, every damn skunk, and don't you ever any of you show your faces there again. That's all I got to say."

"It ain't all _I_ got to say," retorted Houston, standing his ground doggedly, "not by a long shot! You-all talks well, but has you got th' money?"

"What the----" cried Billy, choking.

"Hol' on thar! I repeats it"--and Houston thrust his face at Billy evilly--"has you got th' money? That's a fa'r question in business, I reckons. Has you got th' money? No, you hasn't. You got just an hundred and fifty-two dollars, and that's every red cent you has got."

Billy's immediate act of homicide was checked by this astounding knowledge of the total of his bank account. "Damn you, Tony Houston," he said slowly, at last, "I believe you're drunk too. You come in the mornin' and get paid, an' you'll find yore money comes along all right. This is a hell of a gang," he went on with contempt, "a hell of a gang! I gets you a job that lasts you all winter, and you wants your damn money in a dance hall and raises a row because I ain't carryin' a few thousan' dollars in each pants pocket. Don' think you makes anythin' by it. I lays myself out from now on to see that yore little two by four prospect holes ain't worth th' powder to blow 'em up, and I reckon I has a little influence as superintendent of this game."

"Superintendent?" cried Houston, and the men about laughed loudly.

Billy was plainly even more bewildered than angry. He considered the crowd all, as he expressed it, "plum' locoed"; but his passions, never of the most peaceful, were rising. In another moment he would have knocked Houston down and drawn his gun on the crowd which surrounded him, but that Michail Lafond shoved his way through the press. Billy caught sight of him with relief. Besides the plain bare fact of a row, the situation was complicated by the presence of so great an audience, before whom Billy naturally wished to conduct the affair correctly.

"What is the trouble? Here, this won't do!" cried Black Mike, as though in the capacity of proprietor preserving the respectability of his establishment.

"That's what I wants to know," cried Billy. "This (sulphurous) outfit of ranikaboo ijits has gone plum' locoed, and they stan's around yere howlin' for tha'r money as though I carries th' Philadelphy mint in my clothes!"

Lafond did not reply. He motioned the men aside, and, with the utmost gentleness, led the wondering Billy to a far corner of the room.

"I'm sorry that I have this to do, Billy," said Lafond. "I don't want to. It's none of my lay-out. But these men of yours sent them to me because I am notary public and I must do it."

Billy did not understand, but he caught the apology in Lafond's tone.

"That's all right, old man," he assured the latter, moistening his lips.

Without further preamble, the half-breed drew some papers from his breast pocket, and handed them to Billy.

The first was a review of the work done on the Great Snake group of claims, and a detailed analysis of it, carried out with astounding minuteness of technical knowledge for one so ignorant of mining as Stevens. It outlined also the work that should have been done; and it ended with a general conclusion of incompetence. The second contained his formal dismissal as superintendent. The third returned Billy's shares as his portion in the Company's dissolution, said Company having dissolved without assets.

Billy sat very quietly and read the papers over three times, while his fellow townsmen stood silent and watched him. The first perusal bewildered him, and turned him sick at heart with disappointment and recognition of the estimate in which men held him. The second brought to his consciousness that his companions were regarding him; and that, in turn, caused him to realize that his prestige was crumbled, his integrity dishonored, his abilities belittled. The third impressed on him the desperate straits in which he found himself--without money, holding a doubtful interest in claims whose bad name was by this established so firmly that no Eastern capital would ever take hold of them again, the moral if not legal debtor to these men who had worked all winter for him. The iron turned in his soul. Michail Lafond, sitting there in the role of sympathizer, was well satisfied with his handiwork. For the moment, Billy Knapp was a broken man.

He arose slowly, and passed out of the door in the dead silence of those about him.

After his exit, the dance was forgotten and an earnest discussion raged. It was no light matter. Eleven men had invested heavily in powder, fuse, drills, and windlasses for the purpose of fulfilling their contract with Knapp; and they, and twenty-two others, had put in their time for a number of months. Many of them owed for board or materials. Others, though out of debt, had spent nearly all their ready cash. They all seemed desperately close to bankruptcy, for Lafond said nothing whatever respecting his agreement to pay the contracts himself. And then again, as has been pointed out, the well-being of the whole camp had depended intimately on the success of its big mine, for the success of one enterprise like the Great Snake draws other capital to the district, rendering possible the sale of claims; while its failure always gives a bad name to a whole section.