timers with their
indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains
and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the
middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre,
these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil,
who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality.
There were, too, educated failures from the East and--people who had
blundered. But all alike to-night, irrespective of pasts or presents or
futures, were bent upon enjoying themselves to their capacities.

Callous-handed ranchers and their faded wives promenaded arm in arm.
Sheep-herders and cow-punchers passed in the figures of the dance eyeing
each other in mutual antipathy. The neat "hand-me-downs" of grocery
clerks contrasted with the copper-riveted overalls of shy and silent
prospectors from the hills who stood against the walls envying their
dapper ease. A remittance man from Devonshire whose ancestral halls had
sheltered an hundred knights danced with Faro Nell, who gambled for a
living, while the station agent's attenuated daughter palpitated in the
arms of a husky stage-driver. Mr. Percy Parrott, the sprightly cashier
of the new bank, swung the new milliner from South Dakota. Sylvanus
Starr, the gifted editor of the Crowheart _Courier_, schottisched with
Mrs. "Hank" Terriberry, while his no less gifted wife swayed in the arms
of the local barber, and his two lovely daughters, "Pearline" and
"Planchette," tripped it respectively with the "barkeep" of the White
Elephant Saloon and a Minneapolis shoe-drummer. In the centre of the
floor the new plasterer and his wife moved through the figures of the
French minuet with the stiff-kneed grace of two self-conscious giraffes,
while Mrs. Percy Parrott, a long-limbed lady with a big, white,
Hereford-like face, capered with "Tinhorn Frank," the oily, dark,
craftily observant proprietor of the "Walla Walla Restaurant and
Saloon." Mr. Abe Tutts, of the Flour and Feed Store, skimmed the floor
with the darting ease of a water-spider dragging beside him his far less
active wife, a belligerent-appearing and somewhat hard-featured lady
several years his senior.

But the long, crowded dining-room held two central figures, one of which
was Andy P. Symes, and the other was Essie Tisdale, the little waitress
of the Terriberry House and the belle of Crowheart.

Symes moved among his guests with the air of a man who f