Buck played. When a dance has swung so far as this one had, nothing can check its rhythmic movement. The notes dragged wheezily from the old accordion answered as well to the gathering's warm, free, fluent mood as the truer harmonies of [56] Lance's banjo. Hand clasping hand, Ola and Lance whirled among the others, essaying a simple sort of polka. She was a tireless dancer, and he as light footed as a panther. The two of them began to feel that intoxication of swift movement timed to music which nothing else in life can quite furnish, intensified in the girl by a gripping conviction that this was her hour, and she must make the most of it. She was aflame with it. When Buck broke down she instantly proposed a game of Thimble. Boldly, almost openly, she let herself forfeit a kiss to Lance. There was a babble of tongues and laughter, a hubbub of mirth, a crossfiring and confusion of sound and movement which wrought upon the nerves like broken chords, subtle dissonances, in music. Buck was trying to play again, some of the boys were patting and stamping, others remonstrating, jeering, making ironic suggestions, when Lance, a bit flushed and bright of eye, dropped his arm around the brown girl's waist to take his forfeit. As in duty bound she pulled away from him. He sprang after, caught her by the shoulders, turned her broad little face up to his and kissed her full on the laughing, red mouth. Then a miracle! Kissing Ola Derf was not a serious matter; indeed common gossip hinted that it was a thing all too easily accomplished. But tonight the girl was wrought beyond herself--a [57] magnet. And Lance's sleeping spirit felt the shock of that kiss. But alas for Ola, it was for her rival's behoof the miracle was worked; it was in her rival's cause she had labored, enlisting all her primitive arts, all her ingenuity and resolution! The lights, the music, the movement, the gayety of others, these had, so far, pleased and stimulated Lance as they always did. But the unaccustomed warmth and contact of the dance; the daring and abandon of the kissing game afterward; finally the sudden ravisher's clasp and snatched kiss--these set free in him an impulse which had slumbered till now. To this bold, aggressive, wilful nature it was always the high mountain, the long dubious road, the deep waters--never the easy way, the thing at hand; it was ever his own trail--not the path suggested to his feet. And so, in this sudden awakening, he took no account of Ola Derf, and his whole soul turned toward Callista--Callista the scornful, whose profile, or the side of whose cheek, he was always seeing; Callista who refused to lift her lashes to look at him, and who was ever saying coolly exasperating things in a tone of gentle weariness. If Callista would look at him as Ola Derf had done--if he might catch her thus in his arms--if those lips of hers were offered to his kiss--!