An hour later as the Colonel was leaving his room, the voices of Forsythe and a new-comer ascending the stairs struck on his ear. He leaned over the baluster and looked down at the tops of their approaching heads. Forsythe’s bald pate was followed by another, evidently a younger one, by the curly brown hair that covered it. A pair of shoulders in a dusty coat was beneath the head, and, as they mounted, the Colonel heard a voice of that cultured intonation which the far West scornfully regards as an outgrowth of effete civilizations. In short, the owner of the voice spoke like an Easterner who has had a college education.

The Colonel, if he was doubtful about the top of the head, knew the voice directly.

“Jerry Barclay, by thunder!” he exclaimed over the railing. “What the devil are you doing up here?”

The new-comer started and lifted a handsome face, which, in clean-cut distinction of feature, seemed to match the voice. He cleared the last steps at a bound and stretched out a sinewy brown hand to the older man. There was something delightfully frank and boyish in his manner.

“Well, old son,” he said, “that comes well from you! About the last person in California I expected to see at Foleys. What’s up?”

In the light of the kerosene lamps which illumined the hallway he was shown to be some thirty years of age, tall, slender, upright, with upon him and about him that indescribable air of the man of clubs and cities. His loose sack-coat and flannel shirt set upon his frame with a suggestion of conscious masquerade. He did not belong to the present rough setting, albeit he was so easy of manner and movement that it could not be said of him he was awkwardly out of place anywhere. The genial frankness of his address was the western touch about him, which made him acceptable in a society where his manner of speech might have been resented as a personal reflection. It even outweighed the impression produced by the seal ring he wore. That it was not the outward and visible expression of a mellow friendliness of nature did not matter. What did matter was that it made life much simpler and more agreeable for Jerry Barclay.

“What am I doing up here?” he said in answer to the older man’s question. “Looking after my interests. What else would bring a man into these trails? There’s an old claim of my father’s out Thompson’s Flat way, that they’ve been getting up a fairy tale about. Ever since the Buckeye Belle’s panned out so well they keep inventing yarns down below that sound like forty-nine. But the Buckeye Belle has made a strike, Forsythe tells me.”

“The Gracey boys are here to-night. They’ll tell you all about it. Black Dan won’t have anything else to do.”

The younger man pursed his lips for a whistle of surprise.

“That’s luck,” he said. “What’s Black Dan Gracey doing in a center of civilization like this?”

“Bringing his daughter in for a dance. We’ve got a party on here to-night. Go into your room and primp up the best you know how. Dancing men are short.”

The young man laughed, a deep, jolly laugh.

“Timed it just right, didn’t I? Do you suppose the belles of Foleys will take me this way, travel-stained and weary? I’d like to see Black Dan’s daughter. They say she promises to be a beauty.”

“Promises!” echoed the Colonel; “she kept that promise some time ago. She’s sixteen years old, my boy, and she can take your pelt and nail it to the barn door whenever she’s a mind to.”

The other turned away to the open door of the room Forsythe had lit up for him.

“Sixteen!” he said. “Oh, that’s too young! No, Colonel, I’ve not got to the age when sixteen attracts. But you ought to be just about there. So long! You’ll see me later looking on at your gambols with the sixteen-year-older.”

His boyish laugh issued from the room, and as the Colonel went down stairs he could hear it above the swishing of water and the sound of smitten crockery.

From below the first tentative whinings of the violins rose, and as he reached the lower hall he heard the rattling of vehicles and the sound of voices as the earlier guests began to arrive. To the right of the hall he discovered Black Dan, secluded in a small room reserved by Forsythe for honored patrons, smoking tranquilly as he tilted back in a wooden arm-chair. The Colonel joined him, and for an hour the smoke of their cigars mingled amicably as they talked over the mining prospects of the district, and the Colonel’s scheme for the development of his mineral spring.

It was near nine and the dance had passed its initial stage of bashful gaiety, when they strolled down the balcony to where the windows of the dining-room cast elongated squares of light into the darkness. This room, built on the angle of the house, had a door in the front, flanked by two windows, and down the long side a line of four more windows. Before each aperture there was a gathering of shadowy shapes, the light gilding staring faces.

At the first window the two men stopped and looked in. The dining-room, with its wooden walls, low ceiling and board floor, framed like an echoing shell the simple revel. Its bareness had been decorated with long strands of colored paper, depending from points in the ceiling and caught up in the corners. At intervals along the walls kerosene lamps, backed by large tin reflectors, diffused a raw, bright light, each concave tin throwing a shadow like a stream of ink down the boards below it. In a corner the three musicians worked with furious energy, one blowing a cornet and two scraping violins. A square dance was in progress, and at intervals the man who played the larger violin, his chin dug pertinaciously into the end of his instrument, yelled in strident tones:

“Swing your pardners! Ladies to the right. Shassay all.”

Black Dan, satisfied by the first glance that his daughter was provided with a partner, retraced his steps and took a seat at the deserted end of the balcony, whence the red tip of his cigar came and went against a screen of darkness. The Colonel, much interested, remained looking in.

It was an innocently spirited scene, every participant seeming bent on exacting his full share of enjoyment from the fleeting hour. There were girls who had driven in fifteen and twenty miles from the camps and ranches scattered through the district, and who, flushed and excited, were bounding through the measure with an energy which made the floor vibrate. Their partners, also drawn from a radius of twenty miles about Foleys, were of many varieties, from the few mining superintendents of the neighborhood to some of the underground workers on the Buckeye Belle.

Mitty, clad in maidenly white muslin confined by a blue sash, was evidently much in demand. Her dancing, which was marked by a romping vigor, had loosened her hair, and a half-looped brown braid sent a scattering of hair-pins along the floor. Her partner, the proprietor of the local livery stable, was conducting her through the mazes of the dance with many fancy steps. An occasional haughty glance, a loudly defiant quality in her laugh, and the pert air with which she flounced through the figures, indicated to the watcher that she was acutely conscious of Barney Sullivan, leaning against the wall opposite and eying her with jealous, hang-dog adoration.

In this assemblage of rustic beauty, red, over-heated, and somewhat blowsy, Mercedes Gracey looked smaller, finer and more delicately finished than she had in the afternoon glow, with nature for a background. That she should be participating with obvious pleasure in such an humble entertainment did not surprise the Colonel, used to the democratic leveling of ranks that obtained in foot-hill California. It did not strike him as any more remarkable than that she should be enjoying the society of Joe Mosely, who kept the Sunset Saloon at Thompson’s Flat, and twenty years before, in the days of his own and the state’s uncontrolled youth, had “killed his man” and narrowly escaped lynching in Hangtown.

The watcher’s eye left her with reluctance, for a man at any age, even with a heart cold to the appeal of woman, will linger on the spectacle of youthful beauty. Then his glance swept the wall behind her, where the opened windows were filled with men’s heads, and along the upper end of which a bench ran. On this bench sat a young woman, alone, her head, in profile toward him, thrown out like a painting against the wooden background.

The Colonel’s gaze stopped with a suddenness which suggested the snapping of an internal spring. A fixed, rigid gravity of observation swept all humor from his face, leaving it staring, absorbed, marked with lines. There was nothing about the girl to warrant this access of motionless interest. No better proof could be given of the fact that she was not in any way beautiful or pretty than that, at the very height of the dance, she was evidently partnerless.

Dejection marked her attitude and the youthful profile which she presented to the watcher. Her body had settled back against the wall in a pose of apathetic acquiescence, her hands in her lap, her small feet, which her short skirt revealed, limply crossed. Her dress, of a soft yellowish material, spotted at intervals with a crimson flower, set with some degree of grace and accuracy over the lines of her slightly developed, childish figure. Her feet and hands, the latter showing red against the white forearm that her half-sleeve left bare, were in keeping with the air of fragile smallness which seemed to add a touch of extra pathos to her neglected condition. She did not look like the country girls about her. The Colonel noticed that her hair was cut short as a boy’s. Round the ear and temple that he could see, longer hairs curled slightly.

His immovable scrutiny lasted for some minutes. Then he threw his cigar into the darkness, and, pushing by the loungers at the door, entered the room and threaded his way through the dancers to where she sat. In the noise about her she did not hear his approach or know that any one was near, till he sat down on the bench beside her and said,

“You don’t seem to be dancing?”

She started and turned a face upon him, the surprise of which was partly dispersed by hope of cheer. It was a charming face, if not a pretty one; the skin of a soft, warm pallor, the chin pointed, the mouth small, the middle of the upper lip drooping in a slight point on the lower. Her eyes of a clear, greenish-brown, showed an unusually straight line of under lid. A smile born of relief and the desire to be ingratiating hovered on her lips, and brought into being a dimple in one cheek.

In the first moment of encounter the Colonel saw all these details. The profile had struck him into a trance-like fixity of observation. Now at the full face, the smile with which he had accompanied his words died away. He stared at her for a moment speechless and motionless. And then, with a muttered ejaculation, he half turned from her and looked at the dancers.

The girl was amazed, for she had never seen him before. Her hopes of a partner were forgotten in her alarmed surprise at the demeanor of the person she thought had come to succor her in a dreary hour. She sat looking at him, wondering what to say and nervously rolling the wad of handkerchief she held from hand to hand.

The next moment he had turned back to her, commanding his features into the conventional smile of young acquaintance.

“I must beg your pardon,” he said, “for speaking to you without an introduction, but I thought you’d let an old fellow like me come over here and have a few moments’ talk. I don’t dance, you see, and so I was having a pretty lonely time out there on the piazza.”

His eyes roamed over her face, their eagerness of inspection curiously at variance with his careless words. Her surprise vanished instantly; she turned herself a little that she might more directly face him. She was evidently delighted to have any companion. Looking at him, she smiled with pleased relief and said in a singularly sweet voice,

“Oh, I’m so glad you came! I’ve been sitting here just this way for ever so long. I haven’t danced for three dances. Joe Mosely asked me and then nobody has since. I thought I’d go home, it was so lonesome.”

At the sound of her voice, marked not only by a natural sweetness of tone, but by a refinement of pronunciation very rare among the inhabitants of the country districts, the Colonel was again thrown into numbed, staring silence. He felt that he should have liked to rise and walk back and forth for a moment and shake himself, in order to awake from the strange and poignant memories this girl’s face and voice brought up. He was recalled to himself by seeing the smile slowly freezing on her lips, and the confidence of her eyes becoming clouded with alarm.

“The child will think I’m mad,” he thought, and said aloud: “You’ve startled me and I guess I’ve done the same to you. But you look very like—extraordinarily like—some one, some one, I once knew.”

She was immediately at her ease again.

“I look like my mother,” she said. “Every one says that.”

“Where is your mother?” he asked absently, surveying her with a renewed, wary intentness.

“Here,” she answered.

“Here?” he queried, looking round the room—“where?”

“Oh, not here to-night”—she looked away from him and gave a quick, short sigh—“home, I mean. Mother’s quite sick. Sometimes I think she’s very sick.”

Her face, which was one of the most flexible mobility, lost all its brightness. Her eyes looked mournfully at him, pleading for a contradiction.

“Perhaps,” he said with the rush of pity that he felt for all small feeble things, especially feminine feeble things, “she’s not as sick as you think. When you live with a person who is sick you’re apt to think them worse than outsiders do.”

“Well, perhaps so,” she acquiesced, immediately showing symptoms of brightening. “It probably seems queer to you that I should be here to-night when mother’s sick. But she and father and Rosamund insisted on my coming. They wanted me to go to a party for once anyway, and have a good time. But I haven’t had a good time at all. Just before you came I thought I’d go home, I felt so miserable sitting here alone. Only two people have asked me to dance.”

“You’ve not been in Foleys very long?” the Colonel suggested, in order to account for this strange lack of gallantry on the part of the country swains.

“Three years; nearly four now,” she said, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Of course, I don’t know as many people as Mitty Bruce does. And then there are some of the men round here mother never liked us to know. They——”

She paused, evidently considering that she had better not reveal the reasons why she had been cautioned against certain of the local beaux. But her spirit was weak, and her companion not making any comment, she moved a little nearer to him on the bench and said in a lowered key,

“Some of them occasionally get drunk!”

“Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly.

“So I don’t know so very many. But I thought I’d know enough to have partners. But you never can tell. And then my hair makes me look such a fright. I might have had more partners if it had been longer.”

She passed a small hand, which he noticed was rough and red, over her cropped crown, ruffling the short locks on her forehead.

“How—how did it come to be so?” he asked, looking at it with admiration tinged with curiosity.

“I’ve been sick. I was very sick last winter with a fever, and so in April when I was getting better they cut it all off. We had a bad winter up here, it was so terribly wet. I never saw anything worse; our house leaked all over.”

“It was a wet winter,” he assented. “And I heard it was a good deal worse up here than it was down below.”

“It was dreadful. The rains were so heavy even in March that a big piece of land near where we live slid down. Where it used to be just a slope it’s now like a precipice. And with mother sick and all the trouble to keep things warm and dry, I got the fever. That’s why they made me come to-night—just to have a little amusement, mother said, because I’d had such a hard winter. And we made this dress—” she touched the skirt with a hand that betrayed a conscious feminine satisfaction in her apparel—“it’s some stuff mother had, very good stuff. We couldn’t have afforded to buy anything like it, and I don’t think you could here at Foleys. But we did spend something. These flowers—” she indicated two bunches of artificial red roses at her neck and belt—“we bought them. They were a dollar; fifty cents each bunch.”

She touched the bunch at her waist with a light, arranging hand, saw something which made her brows contract and her fingers seize on the flowers and drag them hurriedly away from their resting place. Where they had been a red stain—dye from the cheap leaves—disfigured her dress.

She stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at the Colonel in blank, heart-stricken dismay.

“Why, look what they’ve done,” she faltered.

The Colonel for a moment was nonplussed. He had no consolation for such a catastrophe. The girl seized her handkerchief and rubbed the mark with dainty energy. The red dye was imparted to the handkerchief but the stain was only enlarged.

“Mother’s dress!” she moaned, rubbing distractedly. “Why, she kept it for years in the trunk, waiting for some such time as this to come. And now look at it!”

She raised tragic eyes to the Colonel’s face. He would have delighted in offering her another dress—anything she had chosen to buy. But she was a lady and this he could not do. So he sat looking sympathetically at her, inwardly swearing at the social conventions which made it impossible for him to repair the damage. He felt a man’s pity for the meanness of the disaster that had such a power to darken and blight one poor little girl’s horizon.

“Don’t rub any more,” was all he could say, “I’m afraid it’s only making it worse. Maybe your mother will know of some way of cleaning it.”

The girl made no reply for the moment. He could see that the mishap had completely dashed her spirits. She unpinned the other bunch, which had left an even uglier mark at her throat, and laid them down beside her on the bench.

“What an unlucky evening!” she exclaimed, looking down at them with an air of utter dejection. “Only two people ask me to dance, and the flowers we paid a dollar for spoil my dress, my first party dress. And they all wanted me to come because I was going to have such a good time!”

She looked from her flowers to her stained dress, shaking her head slowly as though words were inadequate to express the direness of the catastrophe. The Colonel was afraid she was going to cry, but she showed no symptom of tears. She seemed a strayed member of the class which is taught to control its lachrymal glands in public and keep its violent emotions out of sight. But her face showed a distress that was to him extremely pitiful.

“Cheer up,” he said. “As far as the dancing goes the evening’s only half over. And partners—you don’t want to dance with these country bumpkins.”

He lowered his voice at the words, which were indeed rank heresy in the democratic purlieus of Foleys, and made a surreptitious gesture which swept the room.

“Who else is there?” said the girl, who did not show any tendency to combat his low opinion of Foleys’ jeunesse dorée. “And when you come to a party you expect to dance.”

“I’ll get something better for you than that,” said the Colonel, rising. “Wait here for a minute or two. I won’t be gone long and I’ll bring you back somebody worth having for a partner.”

She smiled faintly at him, and he turned, passed through the circling whirl of dancers, and stepped out on the balcony again.

By an adjacent window he saw two masculine figures and smelt the pungent odor of the superior tobacco with which they were beguiling the passing hour. Rion Gracey’s face, gilded by the light of the window, was toward him. The well-shaped back which the other presented to his gaze he recognized as that of Jerry Barclay. He bore down upon them, clapping one hand upon Barclay’s shoulder, with the words,

“Look here, you fellows, I want partners for a girl in there.”

Gracey frowned and said demurringly,

“Now, Jim, what’s the use of coming down on me? Don’t you know I’m no dancing man?”

The other answered,

“Let’s see the girl first. Where is she?”—looking in through the window—“the one over there in pink? Oh, we don’t deserve that. What’s the matter with your being the Good Samaritan and dancing with her yourself?”

“It’s not the one in pink, and you’ve got to come. The poor little thing hasn’t had but two partners this evening and it’s most broken her heart. Here, come along! I’m going to see that she has some fun before this metropolitan orgy ends.”

Gracey threw away his cigar with a suppressed groan of acquiescence. The other man, shaking his coat into shape, said,

“Lead on. Beauty in distress always appeals to me. Having rounded us up you may as well lose no time in taking us to the sacrifice.”

The Colonel with his prizes at his heels reëntered the room. The two men looked very different in the light of the kerosene lamps. Gracey having resolved to do what he had been asked, hid his unwillingness under a demeanor of stiff gravity. Barclay was evidently amused and not averse to following out the adventure. His look of a different world was more marked than ever by contrast with the clumsy country-men about him, but his capacity to adjust himself to all environments made him cross the room with an easy grace, when his companion was obviously out of his element.

The Colonel, flanked by his reinforcements, came to a stand before the young girl. She looked up, smiling, her eye lighting on one man and then on the other. She was surprised, delighted, a trifle embarrassed, as the men could see by a sudden access of color in her cheeks.

“Here,” said the Colonel, “are two gentlemen who have been outside watching us and dying to come in and have a dance. Will you take pity on them, Miss—Miss—” he paused, suddenly realizing that he did not know her name.

“Miss,” he stammered for the third time, and then bent down toward her and said in a lowered voice,

“My dear young lady, forgive me, but you know I don’t know what your name is.”

“My name?” she said, smiling. “Why, how funny! My name is Allen, June Allen. My father is Beauregard Allen and we live on the Parrish tract.”

The Colonel straightened himself suddenly, almost flinching. The two men were looking at the girl and the girl at them, so that none of the trio noticed his expression. He cleared his throat before he spoke.

“Allen,” he said, “Miss Allen, let me introduce Mr. Rion Gracey and Mr. Barclay.”

The introductions were acknowledged and as the men sat down on either side of the no longer lonely young woman the Colonel, with a short “Good night,” turned and left them.

He passed quickly through the dancing-room on to the balcony, his body erect, his eyes staring straight before him. The name of Allen was loud in his ears. It had struck like a dagger thrust through the trained indifference of years and torn open an old wound.