Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/117



HE dance was in full swing—a vehement, rhythmic, dead-in-earnest ranch dance. Eight couples on the floor tramped or tiptoed, as the case might be, but always in perfect time with the two unmelodious fiddles. The tune, if tune it might be called, went over and over and over again, with the monotonous persistency of a sawmill, dominating the rhythmic tread of the dancers, but not subduing the fancy of the caller-out.

The caller-out for the moment was a curly-headed lad of twenty, with a shrewd, good-humored face. He stood in a slouching attitude, one shoulder much higher than the other, and as he gave forth, in a singsong voice, his emphatic rhymed directions, his fingers played idly with the red-silk lacings of his brown flannel shirt. To an imaginative looker-on