Alida still crouched beside the long, even tarpaulin roll that Judith had prepared with hands that knew not what they did.  But now Judith gently roused her and put in her hand a spade; already she herself had begun.  But Alida stared at it dully, as if she did not understand.  Then Judith pointed to something black that had begun to wheel in the sky, wheel, and with each circular swoop come closer to the roll of tarpaulin.  Then Alida knew, and, taking the spade, she and Judith began to dig the grave.

XX

The Ball

The dance in the Benton ranch was the great social event of the midsummer season.  The Bentons had begun to give dances in the days of plenty, when the cattle industry had been at its dizziest height; and they had continued to give dances through all the depressing fluctuations of the trade, perhaps in much the same spirit as one whistles in the dark to keep up his courage.  Thus, though cattle fell and continued to fall in the scale of prices till the end no man dared surmise, the Benton “boys”—­they were two brothers, aged respectively forty-five and fifty years—­continued to hold out facilities to dance and be merry.

All day strange wagons—­ludicrous, makeshift things—­had been discharging loads of women and children at the Benton ranch, tired mothers and their insistent offspring.  To the women this strenuous relaxation came as manna in the wilderness.  What was the dreary round of washing, ironing, baking, and the chain of household tasks that must be done as primitively as in Genesis, if only they might dance and forget?  So the mothers came early and stayed late, and the primary sessions of the dances fulfilled all the functions of the latter-day mothers’ congresses—­there were infant ailments to be discussed, there were the questions of food and of teething, of paregoric and of flannel bands, which, strange heresy, seemed to be “going out,” according to the latest advices from those compendiums of all domestic information, the “Woman’s Pages” of the daily papers.

Inasmuch as these more than punctual debaters must be cooked for, there was, to speak plainly, “feeling” on the part of the housekeeper at the Bentons’.  Wasn’t it enough for folks to come to a dance and get a good supper, and go away like Christians when the thing was over, instead of coming a day before it began and lingering on as if they had no home to go to?  This, at least, was the housekeeper’s point of view, a crochety one, be it said, not shared by the brothers Benton, whose hospitality was as genuine as it was primitive.  To this same difficult lady the infants, who were too tender in years to be separated from their mothers, were as productive of anxiety as their elders.  A room had been set apart for their especial accommodation, the floor of which, carefully spread with bed-quilts and pillows, prevented any great damage from happening to the more tender of the guests; and they rolled and crooned and dug their small fists into each other’s faces while their mothers danced in the room beyond.