Ginger wondered if the doctor, too, had been making up his mind to make up his mind—and had made it up. He was looking rather pensive, and a good deal relieved.
The Lodge, save where the bridge players sat, was only dimly lighted by Chinese lanterns and it was several minutes before Ginger saw that Dean Wolcott was among the slow-moving dancers. The doctor went back to the card table and she sat down in a dusky corner and hoped no one would see her and ask her to dance. They were all very gay to-night; the whole camp seemed vibrating with the laughing, lazy tune the machine was grinding out; she decided to take her Aunt Fan back to San Francisco as soon as she could stand the trip, and to go home to Dos Pozos. She wanted work. And in December she would go on to visit Mary Wiley.
The dance was finished and another one started, and Dean Wolcott bent over her, suddenly. “Will you dance with me, Ginger?”
“I don’t think—I shall have to go back to Aunt Fan—” she began uncertainly.
“Please,” he said, very low, and she got to her feet. The music was a slow, throbbing thing, built on an old slave melody; there was longing in it, and recklessness, and a little recurrent strain of poignant pathos. They danced twice the length of the Lodge without speaking. Then, without warning, when they were near the door, his arms tightened about her. “Come out,” he said, imperatively. “Come down to the creek; I must talk to you. Will you come, Ginger? You must come.” Still dancing, her feet were guided almost over the threshold, and Dean thrust out his arm to open the screen door.
But he stood still, staring, and his other arm fell away from her, for a horseman was galloping furiously up the inviolate Main Street of the tidy camp. “It’s the Scout!”
“Fire!” shouted Elmer Bunty, loping the Mabel horse to the very door of the Lodge and making a spectacular stop. “Forest fire, Ranger!”
“Where?”
Some one had turned off the phonograph and the dancers were crowding out and the card players were pushing back their chairs.
“Lost Valley, coming this way with a high wind and coming fast!” This was the moment Elmer Bunty had been living for; there were thirty people looking at him and listening to him now, and Ginger saw with a little clutch at her heart that Dean Wolcott was not unmindful of it.