The barbaric, musical rhyme on the cat-gut took a fresh lease of life; the delighted spectators clapped their hands in time, and supplemented the music with the regulation dog-like yelps.  The Red River jig consists of two persons of opposite sex standing facing each other, each possessed with the laudable ambition of dancing his or her partner down.  As may readily be imagined, it is a dance necessitating considerable powers of endurance.  When one of the dancers sinks exhausted and vanquished, another steps into the breach.  When Dorothy had made her appearance, a slim and by no means bad-looking half-breed girl had been unwillingly obliged to drop out of the dance.  The bright eyes of the new arrival had caught Pierre La Chene’s fancy, and, after the manner of his kind, he had made haste to secure her as a partner.  Pierre was a philanderer and an inconstant swain.  The dark eyes of Katie the Belle flushed with anger as she saw this strange girl take her place.  She noticed with jealous eyes the elegant fur coat which the other wore, the dainty silk-sewn moccasins, the natty beaver cap, and felt that she, herself a leader of fashion among her people, had yet much to learn.

Dorothy stood stock still for a moment while her partner and the spectators shouted to her to begin.  A wrinkled old dame remarked, in the flowery language of her people, that, as the figure of the girl was slender as the willow, and her feet small and light as those of the wood spirits that return to the land in the spring, surely she could out-dance Pierre La Chene, who had already out-worn the light-footed Jeanette and the beautiful Katie.  Pierre shouted to his partner to make a start.  Surely now she must be discovered and undone!

Then something that, when one comes to think of it, was not strange, happened—­Dorothy rose to the occasion.  She had danced the very same fantasia many a time out of sheer exuberance of spirits, and the love of dancing itself.  She must dance and gain the sympathy of that rough crowd, in the event of her identity being discovered.  There was nothing so terrible about this particular group after all.  They were merely dancing while the others were going in for riot and pillage.  There was something so incongruous and ludicrous in the whole affair that the odd, wayward, fun-loving spirit of the girl, of late held in abeyance, asserted itself, and she forgot all else save the fact that she must do her best to dance her partner down.

Her feet caught the rhythm of the “Arkansaw Traveller” —­that stirring, foot-catching melody without beginning or ending—­and in another minute Dorothy was dancing opposite the delighted and capering half-breed, and almost enjoying it.  With hands on hips, with head thrown back, and with feet tremulous with motion, she kept time to the music.  She was a good dancer, and realised what is meant by the poetry of motion.  The fiddler played fairly well, and Pierre La Chene, if somewhat pronounced in his movements, was at least a picturesque figure, whose soul was in the dance.  So amusing, were his antics that the girl laughed heartily, despite the danger of her position.