Already the polka had come to its giddy end. Men and women, boys and girls, old folks with white hair and young folks in knee breeches and short skirts, laughing and talking crisscrossed the floor this way and that seeking seats. The girls and women sinking affectedly or plumping in matter-of-fact style down into their places, with languishing upward looks if they be young and in tune with the moon outside, with red faced jollity and much frankness of chatter if they were married and perhaps had a husband and children likewise disporting themselves, made long rows about the walls of the schoolhouse, looking for the world like orderly flocks of bright plumaged birds in their bravery of many hued calicos and ginghams; a gay display of bold reds and shy blues, of mellow yellows and soft pinks, with the fluttering of fans everywhere like little restless wings.
The men had left their partners, as custom demanded, and had gone to the doors, energetically mopping their brows with handkerchiefs as various in colour as the women's dresses; red and yellow silk, blue and purple, and the eternal gaudy bandana. Thornton paused at the door, losing himself among the men who had come out to stand there smoking or to wander a little away in the darkness where earlier in the evening each had hidden his personal flask under his particular bush. There would be a good deal of drinking tonight, but then that too was custom, and there was no more danger here of drunkenness than in those more pretentious balls in town where men and women partake together of heady punch.
Thornton passed words of greeting with many of these men, ranchers for the most part whom he knew well. There was Bud King, his tie a vivid scarlet, his store clothes a blue-bird-blue, the wide silk handkerchief mopping his flushed face a rich yellow; there was Hank James from the Deer Creek outfit speeding away with long strides to his own bottle under his own bush where he might conceal the tremor of the new happiness he had but come from and drink to the big-eyed girl in the pink dress with the cascades of baby-ribbon; there was Ruf Ettinger with his new overalls turned back the regulation six inches from the bottoms in a cowboy cuff that permitted of the vision of six inches of grey trouser leg below; there was Chase Harper of Tres Pinos in the smallest boots man ever wore, with the highest heels, their newness a thing of which in their pride they shrieked manfully as he walked; and there was Ben Broderick, the miner, quietly dressed in black broadcloth, looking almost the man of the city. To him Thornton merely nodded, briefly, knowing the man but little, liking him less. But Broderick put out his hand, saying cordially:
"Hello, Buck. Going to shake a leg a little?"
"I might." They were just outside the door, and the cowboy's eyes running on past the miner sought up and down the lines of chatting women for the girl who had tempted him to his first dance in many months. He had seen Pollard's team, but he had not seen Pollard or his niece. Broderick watched him, smiling a little. "Have a drink, Buck?" he asked, seeming not to have noticed the other's curtness of word and manner. "I've got something prime outside."
"Not thirsty right now, Broderick," Thornton returned coolly.
Then he heard a man's voice from the shadows at his back, and without turning knew that Henry Pollard was out there, just behind him. At the same instant his busy eyes found the girl he sought.
Winifred Waverly's days in Hill's Corners had had little enough of the joy of life in them for her; she had felt that she breathed an atmosphere charged with forces which she could not understand; upon her spirit had rested a weight of uncertainty and uneasiness and suspicion; the men she saw had hard, sinister faces and seemed cast for dark, merciless things; even her uncle appeared a strange sort of stranger to her and she shrank from following her natural train of surmise and suspicion when now and then she surprised a certain look upon his face or when she saw him with the type of man with whom he mixed.
Tonight it was as though after a long period of gloomy, overcast skies, a storm had passed and the sun had broken through. About her were light and music, the merry faces of children and girls with everywhere joyous, full throated, light hearted laughter. And the spirit of her ran out to meet the simple joy of the dance, glad just to be glad again.
Thornton knew that he had found her before she turned her face toward him. He recognized the trim little figure although now the riding habit was discarded for a pretty gown of white which he guessed her own quick fingers had fashioned for the dance; he recognized the white neck with the brown tendrils of hair rebelling from the ribbon-band about her head. And then, when she turned a little, he stared at her from his vantage in the outside darkness, wondering if she had grown prettier than ever in the few weeks since he had seen her, or if it were the dress and the way she wore her hair with a white flower in it, or if he had been half blind that other time.