Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/234



T THE Four Corners community dance house, the rule was that every man must leave his arms, both shooting and cutting, at the door. All feuds stopped at the threshold of that place of pleasure; a man might enter there among his blood enemies and enjoy himself in peace. Of course, there was no guaranty against what might happen to him on the way home.

The dance house at Four Corners was a house, not a hall. That distinction maintained everywhere when it was mentioned, for in that word lay the difference, understood and expressed, between a place of the highest respectability and one of low diversions.

The building was made of short-length pine logs, pegged together into a solid wall. It was a large structure, larger than a schoolhouse in that country would have been in those days, for there were far more inhabitants of the dancing age than the student age. It was a sort of primitive recognition of the need of social diversion in a socially barren land, a first step toward meeting the question of how to keep the girls on the ranch.

One dance house in all that immense empty country did not go far toward making life attractive to youth, but it broke the long stretches of lonesome days, and perhaps held more than one girl on the ranch against