The music started up again. Miners darted here and there toward the gaudily dressed women, and, seizing them about the waist, held them close to their sides, as a claim of proprietorship before the whole world. Perspiring masters of ceremonies, self-constituted and drunk, rushed back and forth, trying to put a semblance of the quadrilateral into the various sets. Everybody shuffled feet impatiently.
The dance began with a swirl of noise and hilarious confusion. Bismarck Anne added to the hilarity. She was having a high old time; why shouldn't she? She had had three glasses of forty-rod, and was blessed by nature with a lively disposition and an insignificant bump of reverence. Moreover, she was healthy of body, red of blood, and reckless of consequences. Pleasure appealed to her; the stir of action, the delight of the flow of high spirits, thrilled through every fibre of her being. She had no beliefs, as far as she knew. If she could have told of them, they would have proved simple in the extreme—that life comes to those who live out their possibilities, and not to those who deny them. And Anne had many possibilities, and was living them fast. She felt almost physically the beat of pleasure in the atmosphere about her, and from it she reacted to a still higher pitch. She had drunk three glasses, and her head was not strong. Her feet moved easily, and she was very certain of her movements. She had become just hazy enough in her mental processes to have attained that happy indifference to what is likely to happen in the immediate future, and that equally happy disregard of consequences which the virtuous never experience. Impressions reduced themselves to their lowest terms—movement and noise. The room was full of rapidly revolving figures. The racket was incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth blowing brutishly from puffed cheeks, so the man cursed and left her for another girl. Beyond the puffing youth lights were dancing, green and red. Anne paused and looked at them gravely.
The people, the room, the sounds seemed to her to come and go in great bursts. Between these bursts Anne knew nothing except that she was happy; above all else she was happy. As incidents men kissed her and she drank; but these things were not essentially different from the lights and the bursts of consciousness. Anne began to take everything for granted.
After a time Anne paused again to look gravely at strange lights. But this time they seemed not to be red or green, but to be of orange, in long, fiery flashes, like ribbons thrown suddenly out and as suddenly withdrawn. The noise stopped, and was succeeded by a buzzing. For a moment the girl's blurred vision saw clearly the room, all still, except for a man huddled in one corner, and on the floor a slowly gathering pool of red. Someone thrust her out of the door with others, and she began to step aimlessly, uncertainly, along the broad street.
She felt dimly the difference between the hot air of the dance-hall and the warm air out of doors. The great hills and the stars and the silhouetted houses came and went in visions, just as had the people and the noise inside the hall. The idea of walking came to her, and occupied her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and she set about it with great intentness. How far she went and in what direction did not seem to matter. When she moved she was happy; when she stopped she was miserable. So she wandered on in the way she knew, and yet did not know, out of the broad streets of the town, through a wide cleft in the hills, up a long grassy valley that wound slowly and mounted gradually, following the brawl of the stream, until at last she found herself in a little fern-grown dell at the entrance of Iron Creek Pass. She pushed her fingers through her fallen hair, and idly over the shimmering stuff of her gown. Far above her she saw waveringly the stars. Finally the idea of sleep came to her, just as the idea of walking had come to her before. She sank to her knees, hesitated a moment, and then, with the sigh of a tired child, she pillowed her head on her soft round arm and closed her eyes.
The poor-wills ceased their plaintive cries. A few smaller birds chirped drowsily. Back of the eastern hills the stars became a little dimmer, and the soft night breeze, which had been steadily blowing through the darkened hours, sank quietly to sleep. The subtle magic of nature began to sketch in the picture of day, throwing objects forward from the dull background, taking them bodily out of the blackness, as though creating them anew. Fresh life stirred through everything. The vault of heaven seemed full of it, and all the ravines and by-ways caught up its overflow in a grand chorus of praise to the new-whitening morning.
The woman stirred drowsily and arose, throwing back her heavy hair from her face. The flush of sleep still dyed her cheek a rich crimson, which came and went slowly in the light of the young sun, vying in depth now with the silk of her gown, now with the still deeper tones of a mountain red-bird which splattered into rainbow tints the waters of the brook. She caught the sound of the stream, and went to it. The red-bird retreated circumspectly, silently. She knelt at the banks and splashed the icy water over her face and throat, another red-bird, another wild thing pulsing and palpitating with life. Then she arose to the full height of her splendid body and looked abroad.
The morning swept through her like a river and left her clean. In the eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above. She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket, but he had washed clean his plumes and was now singing the universal hymn from the nearest bush-top. The woman drew her lungs full of the morning. She stretched slowly, lazily, her muscles one by one, and stood taller and freer for the act. The debauch of the last night, the debauches of other and worse nights, the acid-like corrosion of that vulgarity which is more subtle than sin even, all these things faded into a past that was dead and gone and buried forever. The present alone was important, and the present brought her, innocent, before an innocent nature. As she stood there dewy-eyed, wistful, glowing, with loosened hair, the grasses clinging to her, and the dew, she looked like a wide-eyed child-angel newly come to earth. To her the morning was great and broad, like a dream to be dreamed and awakened from, something unreal and evanescent which would go. Her heart unfolded to its influence, and she felt within her that tenderness for the beautiful which is nearest akin to holy tears.
As she stood thus, musing, it seemed natural that a human figure should enter and become part of the dream. It seemed natural that it should be a man, and young; that he should be handsome and bold. It seemed natural that he should rein in his horse at the sight of her. So inevitable was it all, so much in keeping with the soft sky, the brooding shadow of the mountain, the squirrel noises, and the day, that she stood there motionless, making no sign, looking up at him with parted lips, saying nothing. He was only a fraction, a small fraction, of all the rest. His fine brown eyes, the curl of his long hair, the bronze of his features mattered no more to her than the play of the sunlight on Harney.