Over at the saloon—“Pop's Place,” it proclaimed itself in washed-out lettering—three tied horses circled uneasily until they were standing back to the storm, their bodies hunched together with the chill of it, their tails whipping between their legs. They accentuated the blank dreariness of the empty street. The snow was whitening their rumps and clinging, in tiny drifts, upon the saddle skirts behind the cantles.
All the little hollows of the rough, frozen ground were filling slowly, making white patches against the brown of the earth—patches which widened and widened until they met, and the whole street was blanketed with fresh, untrodden snow. Val shivered suddenly, and hurried down-stairs where the air was warm and all a-steam with cooking, and the odor of frying onions smote the nostrils like a blow in the face.
“I suppose we must stay here, now, till the storm is over,” she sighed, when she met Manley at dinner. “But as soon as it clears we must go back to the ranch. I simply cannot endure another week of it.”
“You're gitting uneasy—I seen that, two or three days ago,” said Arline, who had come into the dining room with a tray of meat and vegetables, and overheard her. “You want to stay, now, till after the dance. There's going to be a dance Friday night, you know—everybody's coming. You got to wait for that.”
“I don't attend public dances,” Val stated calmly. “I am going home as soon as the storm clears—if Manley can buy a little hay, and find our horses, and get some sort of a driving vehicle.”
“Well, if he can't, maybe he can round up a ridin'' vee-hicle,” Arline remarked dryly, placing the meat before Manley, the potatoes before Val, and the gravy exactly between the two, with mathematical precision. “I'm givin' that dance myself. You'll have to go—I'm givin' it in your honor.”
“In—my—why, the idea! It's good of you, but—”
“And you're goin', and you're goin' to take your vi'lin over and play us some pieces. I tucked it into the rig and brought it in, on purpose. I planned out the hull thing, driving out to your place. In case you wasn't all burned up, I made up my mind I was going to give you a dance, and git you acquainted with folks. You needn't to hang back—I've told everybody it was in your honor, and that you played the vi'lin swell, and we'd have some real music. And I've sent to Chinook for the dance music—harp, two fiddles, and a coronet—and you ain't going to stall the hull thing now. I didn't mean to tell you till the last minute, but you've got to have time to mate up your mind you'll go to a public dance for oncet in your life. It ain't going to hurt you none. I've went, ever sence I was big enough to reach up and grab holt of my pardner—and I'm every bit as virtuous as you be. You're going, and you'n Man are going to head the grand march.”
Val's face was flushed, her lips pursed, and her eyes wide. Plainly she was not quite sure whether she was angry, amused, or insulted. She descended straight to a purely feminine objection.
“But I haven't a thing to wear, and—”