their singing and laughter at night making the place lively after its summer months of quiet.
Tonight several men were going to the dance, from which they would ride in the waning hours of the night only to change into their working clothes and to the backs of other horses. The memory of the night's pleasures would refresh them as no amount of sleep could do.
Now, as Nearing groaned under the load that galled his heart, pouring forth Alma knew not what story to bring fresh trouble to his already burdened wife, these carefree cowpunchers were singing in the bunkhouse as they went about shaving and slicking up for the dance. There were honest young fellows among Findlay's crew, to whom the indictment laid by Alma before Barrett on the evening of his first arrival at the ranch did not reach. Not all of them were reckless, drinking, swearing social outlaws, although it must be admitted that, taking them the range over, from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri, they were an unholy band.
But some of them were as clean of thought and deed as the best of men, and the lives they led in the open places gave them graces of body and heart lacking in large measure in those more fortunately assigned. Alma had looked forward with anticipation of pleasure to the dance, where she expected to renew old acquaintances and foot off many a quadrille with these supple, simple men.
This consideration was not all that lay behind her desire to go to the dance, although she confessed a plain, girlish, human desire for a dash of unusual pleasure, a bit wilder and rougher than she was accus-
