Three of the young men from Bidwell who came to the dance, were railroad employees, brakemen on freight trains. They, like John Welliver, worked for the Nickel Plate and their names were Sid Gould, Herman Sanford and Will Smith. With them, to the dance, went Harry Kingsley, Michael Tompkins and Cal Mosher, all known in Bidwell as young sports. Cal Mosher tended bar at the Crescent Saloon near the Nickel Plate station in Bidwell and Michael Tompkins and Harry Kingsley were house painters.
The going of the six young men to the dance was unpremeditated. They had met at the Crescent Saloon early on that June evening and there was a good deal of drinking. There had been a ball game between the baseball teams of Clyde and Bidwell during the week before, and that was talked over, and, thinking and speaking of the defeat of the Bidwell team, all six of the young men grew angry. “Let’s go over to Clyde,” Cal Mosher said. The young men went to a livery stable and hired a team and surrey and set out, taking with them a plentiful supply of whiskey in bottles. It was decided they would make a night of it. As they drove along Turner’s Pike, between Bidwell and Clyde they stopped before farmhouses. “Hey, go to bed you rubes. Get the cows milked and go on to bed,” they shouted. Michael Tompkins, called Mike, was the wit of the party and he decided upon a stroke to win applause. At one of the farmhouses he went to the door and told the woman who came to answer his knock that a friend of hers wanted to speak to her in the road and the woman, a plump red-cheeked farmer’s wife, came boldly out and stood in the road beside the surrey. Mike crept up behind her and throwing his arms about her neck pulled her quickly backward. The woman screamed with fright as Mike kissed her on the cheek and, jumping into the surrey, Mike joined in the laughter of his companions. “Tell your husband your lover has been here,” he shouted at the woman, now fleeing toward the house. Cal Mosher slapped him on the back. “You got a nerve, Mike,” he said filled with admiration. He slapped his knees with his hands. “She’ll have something to talk about for ten years, eh? She won’t get over talking about that kiss Mike gave her for ten years.”
At Clyde, the Bidwell young men went into Charley Shuter’s saloon and there got into trouble. Sid Gould was pitcher for the Bidwell team and during the game at Clyde, during the week before, had been hurt by a swiftly pitched ball that struck him on the side of the head as he stood at bat. He had been unable to continue pitching, and the man who took his place was unskillful and the game was lost, and now, standing at the bar in Charley Shuter’s saloon, Sid remembered his injury and began to talk in a loud voice, challenging another group of young men at another end of the bar. Charley Shuter’s bartender became alarmed. “Here, now, don’t you go starting nothing. Don’t you go trying to start nothing in this place,” he growled.
Sid turned to his friends. “Well, the cowardly pup, he beaned me,” he said. “Well, I had the team, this town thinks so much of, eating out of my hand. For five innings they never got a smell of a hit. Then what did they do, eh? They fixed it up with their cowardly pitcher to bean me—that’s what they did.”
One of the young men of Clyde, loafing the evening away in the saloon, was an outfielder on the Clyde ball team and as Sid talked he went out at the front door. From store to store and from saloon to saloon he ran hurriedly, whispering, sending messengers out in all directions. He was a tall blue-eyed soft-voiced man but he had now become intensely excited. A dozen other young men gathered about him and the crowd started for Shuter’s saloon but when they had got there the young men from Bidwell had come out to the sidewalk, had unhitched their horses from the railing before the saloon door and were preparing to depart. “Yah, you,” bawled the blue-eyed outfielder. “Don’t tell lies and then sneak out of town. Stand up and take your medicine.”
The fight at Clyde was short and sharp and when it had lasted three minutes, and when Sid Gould had lost two teeth and two of his companions had acquired bleeding heads, they managed to struggle into the surrey and start the horses. The blue-eyed outfielder, white with wrath and disappointment, sprang on the steps. “Come back, you cheap skates,” he cried. The surrey rattled off over the cobblestones and several Clyde young men ran in the road behind. Sid Gould drew back his arm and caught the outfielder a swinging blow on the nose and the blow knocked him out of the surrey to the road so that a wheel ran over his legs. Leaning out, and mad now with joy, Sid issued a challenge. “Come over to Bidwell, one at a time, and I’ll clean up your whole town alone. All I want is to get at you fellows one or two at a time,” he challenged.
In the road north of Clyde, Cal Mosher, who was driving, stopped the horses and there was a discussion as to whether the journey should be continued on to the town of Fremont, in search of new and perhaps more enticing adventures, or whether it would be better to go back to Bidwell and mend broken teeth, cut lips and blackened eyes. Sid Gould, the most badly injured member of the party, settled the matter. “There’s a dance down at the Dewdrop tonight. Let’s go down there and stir up the farmers. This night is just started for me,” he said, and the heads of the horses were turned northward. On the back seat Will Smith and Harry Kingsley fell into a troubled sleep, Herman Sanford and Michael Tompkins attempted a song and Cal Mosher talked to Sid. “We’ll get up another game with that bunch from Clyde,” he said. “Now you listen and I’ll tell you how to work it. You pitch the game, see. Well, you fan every man that faces you for eight innings. That will show them up, show what mutts they are. Then, when it comes to the ninth inning, you start to bean ’em. You can lay out three or four of that gang before the game ends in a scrap, and when that time comes we’ll have our own gang on hand.”
At the Dewdrop, when the six young men from Bidwell arrived at about eleven o’clock, the dance was in full swing. The doors and windows to the dining room of one of the big frame boarding houses had been thrown open and the floor carefully swept, and over the windows and doorways green branches of trees had been hung. The night was fine—with a moon—and, on a white beach, twenty feet away, the waters of the bay made a faint murmuring sound. At one end of the dance hall and on a little raised platform sat Rat Gould with his brother Will, a small grey-haired man who played a base viol larger than himself. Two other men, fiddlers like Rat himself filled out the orchestra. Nearly every dance announced was a square dance and Rat did the “calling off,” his shrill voice rising above the shuffle of feet and the low continuous hum of conversations. “Swing your pardners round and round. Bow your heads down to the ground. Kick your heels and let her fly. The night is fine and the moon’s on high,” he sang.
In a corner of the big room with her escort, the grocer, from the town of Muncie in Indiana, sat May Edgley. He was a rather heavy and fleshy man of forty-five, whose wife had died during the year before, and for the first time since that event he was with a woman and the thought had excited him. There was a round bald spot on the top of his head and blushes kept running up his cheeks, into his hair and out upon the bald spot, like waves upon a beach. May had put on a white dress, bought for the ceremony of graduation from the Bidwell high school and, the owner being out of town, had borrowed from Lillian,—unknown to her—a huge white hat, decorated with a long ostrich feather, of the variety known as a willow plume.