A cheery atmosphere prevailed; both political parties had buried their differences for the night. All were out for a good time and to do honour to the Valley’s new parliamentary representative.
The men who congregated in the corridors presented a strange contrast; great broad fellows, polite of manner and speaking cultured English, in full evening dress but of a cut of the decade previous; others in their best blue serges; still others in breeches and leggings or puttees; while a few––not of the ballroom variety––refused to dislodge themselves from their sheepskin chaps, and jingled their spurs every time they changed position.
For the most part, the eyes of these men were clear and bright, and their faces were tanned to a healthy brown from long exposure to the Okanagan’s perpetual sunshine. The pale-faced exceptions were the storekeepers, clerks, hotel-men and the bunco-dealers, like Rattlesnake Jim 150 Dalton, who spent their days in the saloons and their nights at the card-tables.
The ladies, seated round the hall, compared favourably with their partners in point of healthy and virile appearance; and many of them, who a few years before, in their former homes in the East and in the Old Land, had not known what it meant to dry a dish, cook a meal or make a dress, who had trembled at the thought of a warm ray of God’s blessed sunshine falling on their tender, sweet-milk complexions unless it were filtered and diluted through a parasol or a drawn curtain, now knew, from hard, honest experience, how to cook for their own household and, in addition, to cater for a dozen ever-hungry ranch hands and cattlemen:––knew not only how to make a dress but how to make one over when the necessity called for it; could milk the cows with the best of their serving-girls; could canter over the ranges, rope a steer and stare the blazing summer sun straight in the eye, with a laugh of defiance and real, live happiness.
The feminine hired-help chatted freely with their mistresses in a comradeship and a kind of free-masonry that only the hard battling with nature in the West could engender.
Phil was leaning idly against the door-post at the entrance to the dance-room, contemplating the kaleidoscope, when Jim’s voice roused him.
“Phil,––I see your dear, dear friend, Mayor Brenchfield, is here.”
“You’ve wonderful eyesight!” Phil answered. “Brenchfield is hardly the one to let anyone miss seeing him. His middle name is publicity, in capital letters.”
“Little chatterbox Jenny Steele tells me he has had three dances out of the last five with Eileen Pederstone,” was the next tantaliser.