The Westerners

by Stewart Edward White

The interims between drinks are occupied by square dances. The men go through some set of monkey shines which they call figures, the principal object of which seems to be at once the tripping up of such male and the prolonged squeezing of such female dancers as they may come into intimate personal relations with on their grand rounds, which is conducive to hilarity of the loud-mouthed variety. The exercise itself is rather violent, and as the room is low, lit by lamps, and comparatively windowless, the air soon becomes heavy with the reek of perspiration and the fumes of tobacco. The floor acquires a heaving motion and the lights sway back and forth. The homeliest of the dance-hall girls somehow looks like a fairy through the haze—a rather elusive fairy, with a rather heavy unfairylike gait. At this period there is usually a good deal of noise. Then all at once it is morning, and somehow the scene has changed to the ravine, and there is a tomato can poking itself into the small of the back.

Molly tripped gracefully and easily through the figures of the opening dance, seeming scarcely to touch the floor. Bismarck Anne leaned heavily on each man in the swing, and pressed her bosom against his arm. Twice she half slipped and caught by the shoulder of her partner of the moment, and her breath was hot against his throat. She said not one word the whole dance through.

With the last quaver of the fiddle came the harsh command—

"S'lute yore pardners! All promenade to th' bar!"

They obeyed. The sets went in two by two, the men treating their masculine partners with humorous politeness in the matter of assistance in crossing the sill of the door. The non-dancers crowded after them in a confused mob.

At the bar Frosty had the drinks all ready on the back shelf. Black Mike assisted him, and together the two, their sleeves rolled back and their faces glistening with the sweat of honest toil, passed over brimming little glasses of "forty rod" and jingled two-bit pieces into the drawer. Bismarck Anne drank with the best of them, leaning familiarly against the men nearest her, bandying jokes that were more than doubtful. Molly sat on her corner of the bar but did not drink.

At the beginning of the next dance the aspect of things was a trifle changed. A bigger crowd gathered about Bismarck Anne soliciting places in her set, and it was more familiar. Some one snatched a kiss of her. She merely laughed and pushed him away. There seemed to have suddenly sprung up between them and her a camaraderie in which Molly had no part, as though they and the newcomer had some secret to keep to themselves which thrust the younger girl without the circle.

Cheyenne Harry did not come near her again. He seemed wholly fascinated by the stranger. The sight of his attentions to the other aroused Molly. A bright red spot burned in either cheek. She was all animation. Her laughter rang true, her eyes flashed with merriment. For every one she had a joke, a half-tender, half-sympathetic aside. She saw that as long as they were in her actual presence the men were wholly hers. And yet she felt too the subtle growth of this other woman's influence, and realized that eventually it would beat her down. In spite of her brave appearance her throat choked her. Only by a great concentration of the will could she prevent herself from lapsing into silence, and then into tears. As the strain began to tell on her nerves, the old feeling of unknowable guilt came to oppress her heart, and with it a growing longing to get away, to hide somewhere; to begin all over again humbly, below the lowest; to claim nothing, to attempt nothing, to do nothing in opposition to that accusing Thought which seemed greater than herself. All at once she was tired of struggling. She was ready to give up this life, if only they would let her feel like something besides a breathless naughty child, fearfully expecting every moment the grave reproving voice of the Master.

She chided herself for this. It was not game. Pluck she admired above everything; and yet here she was, ready to run away at the first taste of defeat. She smiled ravishingly on Dave Kelly, until he began to speculate on the possibility of repeating that delicious experience which Peter had so inopportunely cut short.