"I don't manage it," the other had said.
He was a man of some twenty-eight or thirty years of age, of medium height and with a slender figure, clad somewhat negligently in a dark suit of flannel; he wore a small, soft, blue hat with an upturned brim, which left his features unshaded. They were very keenly chiselled features, not otherwise striking, but their clear cutting imparted delicacy and intimations of refined force to his pale, narrow face. He had a long, drooping brown moustache, and his hair, cut close, was of a kindred tint, but darker. His eyes were full of light and life, darkly gray, and with heavy lashes, and as they rested upon the scene, unique to his experience, for he was city bred, one might never have divined the circumstance of initiation, so ready an acceptance of it all in its best interpretations did they convey. He made apparently no effort to assume this air and mental attitude. As he looked up his glance was singularly free and unaffected.
"I'm taking it all in," he said.
Yates, his fancy titillated by a fresh interest, his blood beginning to pulse at last to the rhythm of happiness in the air, for which the old fiddle marked the time, grudged himself so much pleasure which Adelaide could not share. His heart was warm with the thought of her; a subtle pain of self-reproach thrilled through his consciousness, and presently her name was on his lips.
"My wife," he said, with unwonted communicativeness to the stranger, "she's a great hand fur sech goin's on ez this; an' sech a dancer! Ye mought ez well compare a herd o' cows ter a nimble young fawn ez compare them gals ter Adelaide."
As he roared this out with all the force of his lungs above the violin's strain and the recurrent beat of the dancing feet, his enthusiasm re-enforcing the distinctness and volume of his speech, the careless Mr. Shattuck became slightly embarrassed, and looked about from one side to the other, as if fearful that the colloquy might be overheard. But no one seemed to notice except a certain long and lank mountaineer standing hard by, grizzled and middle-aged, who bore earnest testimony to the same effect, leaning down toward Shattuck to make himself heard.
"Yes, sir; a plumb beautiful dancer; light on her feet, I tell ye! The purties' gal ennywhar round hyar. I hev knowed her sence she war no bigger'n that thar citizen over yander."
He gave a jerk of his thumb toward a year-old child on the outskirts of the crowd standing at the knee of his grandmother, who supported him in an upright posture by keeping a clutch upon his petticoats, while he bobbed up and down in time to the music, thumping first one foot and then the other upon the floor, emulating and imitating the dancers, participating in the occasion with the zest of a born worldling. His grave face, his glittering eye, his scarlet plumpness of cheek, and his evident satisfaction in his own performance combined to secure an affectionate ridicule from the by-standers; but he, and indeed all else, was unobserved by the dancers.
"Ef I hed thunk Adelaide would hev put up with sech ez you-uns, Steve, I'd hev tried myself," protested the elderly bachelor, "though I ain't much of a marryin' man in gineral."
Yates received this with less geniality. "Ye needn't hev gin yerse'f the trouble," he retorted. "Haffen the mounting tried thar luck, an' war sent away with thar finger in thar mouth."