A general shout of laughter followed, and Hardy Atkins, his lips pouted out to play the fool, and his eyes rolling to catch their laughter, came ambling around the wood-pile with a hat that looked like an amateur conjurer's after the celebrated egg trick. But there were enough whole ones left to make a cake, and Happy Jack came galloping in with a hatful from his own private cache; so everybody laughed, though Brigham looked on sourly enough. A rapid fire of barbed jests followed; then, with her two admirers behind her and the others gazing dumbly on, Dixie Lee ran lightly back to the house, and Bowles had had his first lookin on ranch society. It did not look so good to him, either, and yet--well, just as Dixie May turned away she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. To be sure, it was one of Hardy Atkins' raw jokes at which she was laughing, but somehow a golden glow crept into the sunset, and ranch society did not seem so bad. Five minutes later Dixie Lee was down at the corral bridling a white-faced roan, and soon, with Happy Jack for an escort, she was galloping away to the east where, like glowworms in the dusk, the scattered lights of settlers' houses showed the first beginnings of a neighborhood. The phonograph was going to play in the big house that evening, and all the "nesters" were invited. No one had been more outraged than Henry Lee when the first nesters came in on his range; but latterly he had come to regard them tolerantly as poor, misguided creatures, slightly touched in the head on the subject of high-and-dry farming. Having seen a few hundred of them starve out and move on, he had accepted them as a necessary evil, and deemed it no more than right, if the women-folks wanted to invite them, to ask the few nearest ones to the house and help them forget their misery. So the whole-souled Dixie May was off to call in the company while the cowboys were scraping their beards off and dolling up for the dance. It was Saturday night, as a matter of fact, and though all days are alike to a puncher his evenings are his own around the ranch. One by one the socially backward and inept caught the fever and began to search their war-bags for silk handkerchiefs and clean shirts. Only Brigham remained recalcitrant, and no argument could induce him to shave. "I was on the wrangle last night," he complained, as the forehanded ones came back to argue the matter, "and I'm short on my sleep. Say, lemme be, can't ye--what difference does it make to you fellers, anyway? They won't be girls enough to go around, nohow!" "Well, come up and hear the music," urged the Bar Seven stray man, who wanted him for company. "Mrs. Lee invited you, Brig," reminded Gloomy Gus, who believed that every man should do his duty. "Aw, it's too late to do anything now," grumbled Brigham, beginning at last to weaken. "And my beard is a fright, too!"