"They balked," Sylvester admitted calmly. "They're fine girls, Miss Sheila. And they're lookers. But they just aren't quite fine enough.

They're not artists, like your Poppa and like you--and like me."

Sheila put a hand up to her cheek. Her eyes came back to their accustomed narrowness and a look of doubt stole into her face.

"Artists?"

"Yes'm." Sylvester had begun to walk about. "Artists. Why, what's an artist but a person with a dream he wants to make real? My dream's--The Aura, girl. For three years now"--he half-shut his eyes and moved his arm in front of him as though he were putting in the broad first lines of a picture--"I've seen that girl there back of my bar--shining and _good_ and fine--not the sort of a girl a man'd be lookin' for, mind you, just _not_ that! A girl that would sort of take your breath. Say, picture it, Sheila!" He stood by her and pointed it out as though he showed her a view. "You're a cowboy. And you come ridin' in, bone-tired, dusty, with a _thirst_. Well, sir, a thirst in your throat and a thirst in your heart and a thirst in your soul. You're wantin' re-freshment. For your body and your eyes and your mind. Well, ma'am, you tie your pony up there and you push open those doors and you push 'em open and step plumb into Paradise. It's cool in there--I'm picturin' a July evenin', Miss Sheila--and it's quiet and it's shining clean. And there's a big man in white who's servin' drinks--cold drinks with a grand smell. That's my man Carthy. He keeps order. You bet you, he does keep it too. And beside him stands a girl. Well, she's the kind of girl you--the cowboy--would 'a'

dreamed about, lyin' out in your blanket under the stars, if you'd 'a'

knowed enough to be able to dream about her. After you've set eyes on her, you don't dream about any other kind of girl. And just seein' her there so sweet and bright and dainty-like, makes a different fellow of you. Say, goin' into that bar is like goin' into church and havin' a jim-dandy time when you get there--which is something the churches haven't got round to offerin' yet to my way of thinkin'. Now. I want to ask you, Miss Sheila, if you've got red blood in your veins and a love of adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call 'life'--and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it--and if you've acquired a feeling of grat.i.tude for Pap and if you've got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you're a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma'am, I ask you, could you turn down a chance like that?"

He stood away a pace and put his question with a lifted forefinger.

Sheila's eyes were caught and held by his. Again her mind seemed to be fastened to his will. And the blood ran quickly in her veins. Her heart beat. She was excited, stirred. He had seen through her sh.e.l.l unerringly as no one else in all her life had seen. He had mysteriously guessed that she had the dangerous gift of adventure, that under the shyness and uncertainty of inexperience there was no fear in her, that she was one of those that would rather play with fire than warm herself before it.

Sheila stood there, discovered and betrayed. He had played upon her as upon a flexible young reed: that stop, her ambition, this, her romanticism, that, her vanity, the fourth, her grat.i.tude, the fifth, her idealism, the sixth, her recklessness. And there was this added urge--she must stay here and drudge under the lash of "Momma's" tongue or she must accept this strange, this unimaginable offer. Again she opened her eyes wider and wider. The pupils swallowed up the misty gray. Her lips parted.

"I'll do it," she said, narrowed her eyes and shut her mouth tight. With such a look she might have thrown a fateful toss of dice.

Sylvester caught her hands, pressed them up to his chest.

"It's a promise, girl?"

"Yes."

"G.o.d bless you!"

He let her go. He walked on air. He threw open the door.

There on the threshold--stood "Momma."

"I kind of see," she drawled, "why Sheila don't take no interest in dancin'!"

"You're wrong," said Sheila very clearly. "I have been persuaded. I am going to the dance."

Sylvester laughed aloud. "One for you, Momma!" he said. "Come on down, old girl, while Miss Sheila gets into her party dress. Say, Aura, aren't you goin' to give me a dance to-night?"

His wife looked curiously at his red, excited face. She followed him in silence down the stairs.

Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt down beside her little trunk and opened the lid. The sound of the fiddle stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness. There in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance. She had worn it only once.

It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out. It seemed to her that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.

CHAPTER IX

A SINGEING OF WINGS

All the vitality of Millings--and whatever its deficiencies the town lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth--throbbed and stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night. To understand that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath the surface of the snow. There were men and women and children, too, who had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.

A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows, their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need. One infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair immediately beside the big drum. Whether the spot was chosen for the purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits n.o.body cared to inquire. Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they caused became acute. They were not taken very seriously. That they grew up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems almost above the need of any other stimulant.

The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was at about six o'clock, and went on till the last guest left, at about ten the next morning. In the meantime the Greelys' hospitality provided every variety of refreshment.

When Sheila reached the Town Hall, crowded between Sylvester and joyous Babe in her turquoise blue on the front seat of the Ford, while the back seat was occupied by Girlie in scarlet and "Momma" in purple velveteen, the dance was well under way. The Hudsons came in upon the tumult of a quadrille. The directions, chanted above the din, were not very exactly heeded; there was as much confusion as there was mirth. Sheila, standing near Girlie's elbow, felt the exhilaration which youth does feel at the impact of explosive noise and motion, the stamping of feet, the shouting, the loud laughter, the music, the bounding, prancing bodies: savagery in a good humor, childhood again, but without the painful intensity of childhood. Sheila wondered just as any _debutante_ in a city ballroom wonders, whether she would have partners, whether she would have "a good time." Color came into her face. She forgot everything except the immediate prospect of flattery and rhythmic motion.

Babe pounced upon a young man who was shouldering his way toward Girlie.

"Say, Jim, meet Miss Arundel! Gee! I've been wanting you two to get acquainted."

Sheila held out her hand to Mr. James Greely, who took it with a surprised and dazzled look.

"Pleased to meet you," he murmured, and the dimple deepened in his ruddy right cheek.

He turned his blushing face to Girlie. "Gee! You look great!" he said.

She was, in fact, very beautiful--a long, firm, round body, youthful and strong, sheathed in a skin of cream and roses, lips that looked as though they had been used for nothing but the tranquil eating of ripe fruit, eyes of unfathomable serenity, and hair almost as soft and creamy as her shoulders and her finger-tips. Her beauty was not marred to Jim Greely's eyes by the fact that she was chewing gum. Amongst animals the only social poise, the only true self-possession and absence of shyness is shown by the cud-chewing cow. She is diverted from fear and soothed from self-consciousness by having her nervous attention distracted. The smoking man has this release, the knitting woman has it. Girlie and Babe had it from the continual labor of their jaws. Every hope and longing and ambition in Girlie's heart centered upon this young man now complimenting her, but as he turned to her, she just stood there and looked up at him.

Her jaws kept on moving slightly. There was in her eyes the minimum of human intelligence and the maximum of unconscious animal invitation--a blank, defenseless expression of--"Here I am. Take me." As Jim Greely expressed the look: "Girlie makes everything easy. She don't give a fellow any discomfort like some of these skittish girls do. She's kind of home folks at once."

"We can't get into the quadrille now," said Jim, "but you'll give me the next, won't you, Girlie?"

"Sure, Jim," said the unsmiling, rosy mouth.

Jim moved uneasily on his patent-leather feet. He shot a sidelong glance at Sheila.

"Say, Miss Arundel, may I have the next after ... Meet Mr. Gates," he added spasmodically, as the hand of a gigantic friend crushed his elbow.

Sheila looked up a yard or two of youth and accepted Mr. Gates's invitation for "the next."

The head at the top of the tower bent itself down to her with a snakelike motion.

"Us fellows," it said, "have been aiming to give you a good time to-night."

Sheila was relieved to find him within hearing. Her smile dawned enchantingly. It had all the inevitability of some sweet natural event.

"That's very good of--you fellows. I didn't know you knew that there was such a person as--as me in Millings."

"You bet you, we knew. Here goes the waltz. Do you want to Castle it? I worked in a Yellowstone Park Hotel last summer, and I'm wise on dancing."

Sheila found herself stretched ceilingwards. She must hold one arm straight in the air, one elbow as high as she could make it go, and she must dance on her very tip-toes. Like every girl whose life has taken her in and out of Continental hotels, she could dance, and she had the gift of intuitive rhythm and of yielding to her partner's intentions almost before they were muscularly expressed. Mr. Gates felt that he was dancing with moonlight, only the figure of speech is not his own.

Girlie in the arms of Jim spoke to him above her rigid chin. Girlie had the haughty manner of dancing.

"She's not much of a looker, is she, Jim?" But the pain in her heart gave the speech an audible edge.

"She's not much of anything," said Jim, who had not looked like the young man on the magazine cover for several busy years in vain. "She's just a sc.r.a.p."

But Girlie could not be deceived. Sheila's delicate, crystalline beauty pierced her senses like the frosty beauty of a winter star: her dress of white mist, her slender young arms, her long, slim, romantic throat, the finish and polish of her, every detail done lovingly as if by a master's silver-pointed pencil, her hair so artlessly simple and shining, smooth and rippled under the lights, the strangeness of her face! Girlie told herself again that it was an irregular face, that the chin was not right, that the eyes were not well-opened and lacked color, that the nose was odd, defying cla.s.sification; she knew, in spite of the rigid ignorance of her ideals, that these things mysteriously spelled enchantment. Sheila was as much more beautiful than anything Millings had ever seen as her white gown was more exquisite than anything Millings had ever worn. It was a work of art, and Sheila was, also, in some strange sense, a work of art, something shaped and fashioned through generations, something tinted and polished and retouched by race, something mellowed and restrained, something bred. Girlie did not know why the white tulle frock, absolutely plain, shamed her elaborate red satin with its exaggerated lines. But she did know. She did not know why Sheila's subtle beauty was greater than her obvious own. But she did know. And so great and bewildering a fear did this knowledge give her that, for an instant, it confused her wits.