An Englishman, however, was the life of that dance, and he was physically a larger man than most of the rest, for, as a rule, the Colonial born run to wiry hardness rather than to solidity of frame. Gregory Hawtrey was tall and thick of shoulder, though the rest of him was in fine modeling, and he had a pleasant face of the English blue-eyed type. Just then it was shining with boyish merriment, and indeed an irresponsible gayety was a salient characteristic of the man. One would have called him handsome, though his mouth was a trifle slack, and though a certain assurance in his manner just fell short of swagger. He was the kind of man one likes at first sight, but for all that not the kind his hard-bitten neighbors would have chosen to stand by them through the strain of drought and frost in adverse seasons.
As it happened, the grim, hard-faced Sager, who had come there from Michigan, was just then talking about him to Stukely.
“Kind of tone about that man—guess he once had the gold-leaf on him quite thick, and it hasn’t all worn off yet,” said Sager. “Seen more Englishmen like him, and some folks from Noo York, too, when I took parties bass fishing way back yonder.”
He waved his hand vaguely, as though to indicate the American Republic, and Stukely agreed with him. They were right as far as they went, for Hawtrey undoubtedly possessed a grace of manner which, however, somehow failed to reach distinction. It was, perhaps, just a little too apparent, and lacked the strengthening feature of restraint.
“I wonder,” remarked Stukely reflectively, “what those kind of fellows done before they came out here.”
He had expressed a curiosity which is now and then to be met with on the prairie, but Sager, the charitable, grinned.
“Oh,” he responded, “I guess quite a few done no more than make their folks on the other side tired of them, and that’s why they sent them out to you. Some of them get paid so much on condition that they don’t come back again. Say”—and he glanced toward the dancers—“Dick Creighton’s Sally seems quite stuck on Hawtrey by the way she’s looking at him.”
Stukely assented. He was a somewhat primitive person, as was Sally Creighton, for that matter, and he did not suppose that she would have been greatly offended had she overheard his observations.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve thought that, too. If she wants him she’ll get him. She’s a smart girl—Sally.”
There were not many women present—perhaps one to every two of the men, which was rather a large proportion in that country, and their garments were not at all costly or beautiful. The fabrics were, for the most part, the cheapest obtainable, and the wearers had fashioned their gowns with their own fingers, in the scanty interludes between washing, and baking, and mending their husbands’ or fathers’ clothes. The faces of the women were a trifle sallow and had lost their freshness in the dry heat of the stove. Their hands were hard and reddened, and in figure most of them were thin and spare. One could have fancied that in a land where everybody toiled strenuously their burden was heavier than the men’s. One or two of the women clearly had been accustomed to a smoother life, but there was nothing to suggest that they looked back to it with regret. As a matter of fact, they looked forward, working for the future, and there was patient courage in their smiling eyes.