ng over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her
partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own
interpretation--barbaric, passionate, rude, but magnificently vivid. And
the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping
feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her
hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of
disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the
utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie's train.

The "XXX" men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment,
keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles
were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all
day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness
despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have
a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the
whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others. The rest of
the "XXX" party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed
hospitable. They were still dusty from their long ride of the early
morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been
haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something
heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had
secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The "caller-out," stationed
between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a
wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered
compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax's feet, he joked Henderson on
his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic
into his bowing, Jose's fiddle rioted with the madness of it.

Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart
cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost cruelty
of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they
had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might evade the
stigma of "cattle-thief," that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not
fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give credence to
the tale of Jim's escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn
the pittance that would give the children the "clean start" that Jim had
set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be