“It isn’t so much I want to see her again,” he told himself, “as I want to give back her spur rowel!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE DANCE AT DEER CREEK SCHOOLHOUSE

Deer Creek schoolhouse stood in a tiny, emerald valley half a dozen miles from Hill’s Corners, some fifteen miles from Thornton’s cabin, its handful of barefooted pupils coming from the families scattered through the valley.  It was a one roomed building with two low doors and six square windows.  And yet it offered ample enough floor space and bench accommodations for the valley dances, its one room being twenty-four feet long and twelve feet wide, certainly over large for the single “school marm” and her small flock, having been constructed with an eye to just such social gatherings as the one tonight.

The teacher’s desk had been taken outdoors by willing hands; the pupils’ benches stood along the walls for the “women folk” during the intermissions; upon the slightly raised platform at one end of the room were the chairs for the musicians, fiddler and guitarist.  And upon the floor was much shaved candle.  For light there were the four coal-oil lamps with their foolish reflectors against the walls, and a full moon shining in through door and windows.

Thornton came late, late that is, for a country dance.  It was after nine o’clock when, riding Comet, he saw the schoolhouse lamps winking at him through the oaks and heard the merry music of fiddle and guitar in the frolic of a heel-and-toe polka.  Already he made out here and there the saddle horses which had brought so many “stags” so many miles to the dance, and which stood tied to tree and shrub.  Also there were the usual spring wagons that had brought their family loads of father, mother, son, daughter, hired man and the baby; while the inevitable cart was in evidence speaking unmistakably of mooning couples whose budding interest in each other did not permit of the drive in the family carry-all.

Thornton noted the vehicles as he passed them, and turned to look at the saddle horses, saying to himself, “So-and-so is here from Pine Ridge, So-and-so from the Corners.”  For hereabouts a man knew another man’s horse and saddle, or wagon, as well as he knew the man himself.  So when Thornton saw the buckboard near the door with its two cream-coloured mares, there was at once pleasure and speculation in his eyes, and he told himself, “Somebody is here from Pollard’s.”

He loosened Comet’s cinch, flung the tie rope over the low limb of the big oak near Pollard’s team, and leaving his horse in the shadows, went on to the open door.