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, José’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, that the neighbors might give credence to the tale of Jim’s escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn the pittance that would give the children the “clean start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music, the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers, magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping, clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild rhythm of Miguel’s fiddle, and young José’s bow capered madly.