“Anything to me?  My dear Kitty, I’ve never had a better friend than Judith Rodney.”

The dance was at its flood-tide.  The exhilaration had grown with each sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies, with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool.  The dancing Mrs. Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be.  Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain.  Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own interpretation—­barbaric, passionate, rude, but magnificently vivid.  And the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie’s train.

The “XXX” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all day.  Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others.  The rest of the “XXX” party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable.  They were still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it.  Henderson had secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner.  The “caller-out,” stationed between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task.  He improvised, he put a wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax’s feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty.  Miguel put fresh magic into his bowing, Jose’s fiddle rioted with the madness of it.

Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do.  It was the utmost cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they had killed him.  But she must do it, that his children might evade the stigma of “cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not fall across their young lives,