“My dear,” he said, “you really shouldn’t hit a fellow in the eye that way.”
As it happened, he did not see the girl’s face just then, or he might have noticed a momentary change in its expression. Gregory Hawtrey was a little casual in speech, but, so far, most of the young women upon whom he bestowed an epithet indicative of affection had attached no significance to it. They had wisely decided that he did not mean anything.
The Scottish fiddler’s voice broke in.
“Can ye no’ watch the music? Noo it’s paddy-bash!” he cried.
His French Canadian comrade waved his fiddle-bow protestingly.
“Paddybashy! V’la la belle chose!” he exclaimed with ineffable contempt, and broke in upon the ranting melody with a succession of harsh, crashing chords.
Then began a contest as to which could drown the other’s instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men who wore long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient nerve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, but there is probably no music in the world that fires the blood like this and turns the sober dance to rhythmic riot. Perhaps, too, amid the prairie snow, it gains something that gives it a closer compelling grip.
Hawtrey was breathless when it ceased, and Sally’s eyes flashed with the effulgence of the Northern night when her partner found her a resting-place upon an upturned barrel.
“No,” she declared, “I won’t have any cider.” She turned and glanced at him imperiously. “You’re not going for any more either.”
It was, no doubt, not the speech a well-trained English maiden would have made, but, though Hawtrey smiled rather curiously, it fell inoffensively from Sally’s lips. Though it is not always set down to their credit, the brown-faced, hard-handed men as a rule live very abstemiously in that country, and, as it happened, Hawtrey, who certainly showed no sign of it, had already consumed rather more cider than anybody else. He made a little bow of submission, and Sally resumed their conversation where it had broken off.