the
saddle horses, saying to himself, "So-and-so is here from Pine Ridge,
So-and-so from the Corners." For hereabouts a man knew another man's
horse and saddle, or wagon, as well as he knew the man himself. So when
Thornton saw the buckboard near the door with its two cream-coloured
mares, there was at once pleasure and speculation in his eyes, and he
told himself, "Somebody is here from Pollard's."

He loosened Comet's cinch, flung the tie rope over the low limb of the
big oak near Pollard's team, and leaving his horse in the shadows, went
on to the open door.

Already the polka had come to its giddy end. Men and women, boys and
girls, old folks with white hair and young folks in knee breeches and
short skirts, laughing and talking crisscrossed the floor this way and
that seeking seats. The girls and women sinking affectedly or plumping
in matter-of-fact style down into their places, with languishing upward
looks if they be young and in tune with the moon outside, with red faced
jollity and much frankness of chatter if they were married and perhaps
had a husband and children likewise disporting themselves, made long
rows about the walls of the schoolhouse, looking for the world like
orderly flocks of bright plumaged birds in their bravery of many hued
calicos and ginghams; a gay display of bold reds and shy blues, of
mellow yellows and soft pinks, with the fluttering of fans everywhere
like little restless wings.

The men had left their partners, as custom demanded, and had gone to the
doors, energetically mopping their brows with handkerchiefs as various
in colour as the women's dresses; red and yellow silk, blue and purple,
and the eternal gaudy bandana. Thornton paused at the door, losing
himself among the men who had come out to stand there smoking or to
wander a little away in the darkness where earlier in the evening each
had hidden his personal flask under his particular bush. There would be
a good deal of drinking tonight, but then that too was custom, and there
was no more danger here of drunkenness than in those more pretentious
balls in town where men and women partake together of heady punch.

Thornton passed words of greeting with many of these men, ranchers for
the most part whom he knew well. There was Bud King, his tie a vivid
scarlet, his store clothes a blue-bird-blue, the wide silk handkerchief
mopping his flushed face a rich yellow; there was Hank James from the
Deer Creek outfit speeding away w