“Aren’t you going to the dance?” asked Dan.
“Oh, it’s so late I don’t like to go. I think I’ll tumble in and take a good rest. There’s work coming to-morrow.”
“Yes,” responded Dan, “and there’ll be few hands to do it. The boys won’t get rid of their whisky by then.”
The two chatted on a little while, then both went to their bunks and quieted down. Fred lay for a few moments listening to the frogs croaking in the pond near by till he dropped off into a sleep as peaceful as the night about him.
Across the creek at Morgan’s ranch, however, the night was far from quiet. The big rooms of the ranch house were bright with light and ringing with music, laughter, and chatty, half-boisterous voices. The dance was at its height.
Old Morgan had been in the war, and he was full of patriotism, always flinging his doors wide open on the Fourth with Western welcome to all his neighbors, urging them to come, and taking it hard if they didn’t. So they came in force, on horseback or clattering in buckboards, came full of rough fun, and when they could get it, full of whisky.
It was a noisy, jolly crowd that gathered on this night, cowboys and ranch girls, all ready to swing themselves dizzy, ripe for excitement, whether it came in the form of a frolic or a fight. For, though the program never called for it, a “cowboy scrap” was the one impromptu part always expected, and welcomed by many. A dance, indeed, would have been thought tame without it. There were those who never missed any chance to touch it off, by some tantalizing act which was lighted matches to powder.
The doings of the day had helped to put the boys at pistol points. Yet for some reason the under current of ill will was kept down unusually well. It might have been because Colonel Morgan, the soldierly, gray-haired master of the place, who, because of the drinking, rather anticipated trouble, had opened the dance with this cheery warning:
“Now, lads and lassies, I asked you here to have a good time; I am going to see that you have it, even if I have to pitch any fool out that does a trick to spoil our fun. Come, Uncle Toby, make the old fiddle do some lively talking.”
“All right, Colonel,” called back a roly-poly, baldhead of a man, perched on a high seat in a corner. “Take yer pardners fer a grand waltz.”