A squaw came up to the young soldier and offered innocently her face for a kiss.

Beresford knew the tribal custom.  It was his business to help establish friendly relations between the Mounted and the natives.  He kissed the wrinkled cheek gallantly.  A second dusky lady shuffled forward, and after her a third.  The constable did his duty.

His roving eye caught Jessie’s, and found an imp of mischief dancing there.  She was enjoying the predicament in which he found himself.  Out of the tail of that same eye he discovered that two more flat-footed squaws were headed in his direction.

He moved briskly across the floor to the counter, vaulted it, and stood beside Jessie.  She was still laughing at him.

“You’re afraid,” she challenged.  “You ran away.”

A little devil of adventurous mirth was blown to flame in him.  “I saw another lady, lonely and unkissed.  The Force answers every call of distress.”

Her chin tilted ever so little as she answered swiftly.

  “He who will not when he may,
  When he will he shall have nay.”

Before she had more than time to guess that he would really dare, the officer leaned forward and kissed the girl’s dusky cheek.

The color flamed into it.  Jessie flung a quick, startled look at him.

“Kissing Day, Sleeping Dawn,” he said, smiling.

Instantly she followed his lead.  “Sleeping Dawn hopes that the Great Spirit will give to the soldier of the Great Mother across the seas many happy kissing days in his life.”

“And to you.  Will you dance with me?”

“Not to-day, thank you.  I don’t jig in public.”

“I was speaking to Miss McRae and not to Sleeping Dawn, and I was asking her to waltz with me.”

She accepted him as a partner and they took the floor.  The other dancers by tacit consent stepped back to watch this new step, so rhythmic, light, and graceful.  It shocked a little their sense of fitness that the man’s arm should enfold the maiden, but they were full of lively curiosity to see how the dance was done.

A novel excitement pulsed through the girl’s veins.  It was not the kiss alone, though that had something to do with the exhilaration that flooded her.  Formally his kiss had meant only a recognition of the day.  Actually it had held for both of them a more personal significance, the swift outreach of youth to youth.  But the dance was an escape.  She had learned at Winnipeg the waltz of the white race.  No other girl at Faraway knew the step.  She chose to think that the constable had asked her because this stressed the predominance of her father’s blood in her.  It was a symbol to all present that the ways of the Anglo-Saxon were her ways.

She had the light, straight figure, the sense of rhythm, the instinctively instant response of the born waltzer.  As she glided over the floor in the arms of Beresford, the girl knew pure happiness.  Not till he was leading her back to the counter did she wake from the spell the music and motion had woven over her.