Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/207



T turned out that the man of-accomplishment so indispensable to the gaiety of the occasion was a saturnine, dark-faced, sinewy hillbilly, originally from the Ozarks of Missouri. He called off the figures of the dances through a small aperture in the corner of his twisted mouth, running the rest of the sound out of his nose.

This man was foreman on a ranch forty of fifty miles distant from Jim Kelly's. He had come at Frank's long-carried invitation, though what pleasure he got out of the dance himself was beyond Louise Gardner's speculative realm. Glum and ill-favored, he appeared to look on it all as a trifling piece of folly in which circumstances had forced him to play a part. He grinned a little at rare intervals, a sort of beginning and ending of a grin, with none of the full-spread humor, but as a caller he was eminent in the land. He danced but seldom, and then with Louise. He said he was acquainted with her; she had served him breakfast once at the hotel.

True to Maud's prediction, Tom Laylander arrived