Peter set his lips. “At the expense of spoiling Nannie’s pretty romance, I must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the most beautiful of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room. It would be as ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to her as it would to—well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the question at a woman’s club—‘Was Joan of Arc a lady?’” Peter spoke without calculating the conviction that his words carried. He was angry, and his manner, voice, intonation showed it.
Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by Peter’s ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang that gnawed her little soul: “I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I did not, of course, know that this young woman was anything to you.”
“Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I’ve never had a better friend than Judith Rodney.”
The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies, with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs. Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own interpretation—barbaric, passionate, rude, but magnificently vivid. And the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie’s train.
The “XXX” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others. The rest of the “XXX” party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable. They were still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The “caller-out,” stationed between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax’s feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic into his bowing, José’s fiddle rioted with the madness of it.
Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might evade the stigma of “cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give credence to the tale of Jim’s escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn the pittance that would give the children the “clean start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music, the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers, magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping, clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild rhythm of Miguel’s fiddle, and young José’s bow capered madly.
Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-lust of the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur; the dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson as he danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead trees, and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze like a pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him to his camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel’s fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney’s face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate—Rodney’s face, refined, sharpened, tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney’s face! Henderson could not withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the midst of the dancers like a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his eyes as if to brush away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms and rushed from the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel’s bow stopped with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for an explanation of Henderson’s sudden panic, but all was dark without on the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of drapery that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air. “What was it?” the dancers asked one another in whispers.
And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them. There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in her eyes something of Mary’s look, as she turned from Calvary. The dancers still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms about their partners’ waists, the women stepping forward; they were like the painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some word was due from him to explain his terror of a moment ago.
“Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the window.”
“A ghost that’s ready to dance.” She held out her hand to him. In her gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading the meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect replica of the dead man’s, looked at him.