"'You think somebody like to marry me? I got dam-fine house, and furniture, and Smiler.'

"'_Somebody_ might,' she say.

"Well, Phil,--I seem to be getting on pretty good, so I take the bull by the tail and say right bang off the wrong side of the bat, 'You be my wife?'

"'What?' she say, as if maybe she make a mistake in her ear-drums.

"'You marry me?' I ask again.

"She pull the blinds down all over her face just like biff. She take one swing on me, Phil, right there, and pretty near break my jaw;--knock my four dollar hat all to h.e.l.l in the middle of the road and walk away laughing like, like--oh, like big, fat, laundry maid laugh."

Very seriously, Phil asked his further adventures.

"Ain't that plenty for one day? No dam-good catch wife that way. I try another trick, though. Maybe it work better."

"What's the other trick, Sol?"

The big simpleton drew a pink coloured, badly frayed newspaper out of his pocket. It was _The Matrimonial Times_, a monthly sheet printed in Seattle and intended for the lonely, lovesick and forlorn of both s.e.xes; a sort of agony column by the mile.

"You don't mean to say you correspond with anybody through that?"

"You bet!"

"And can't you land anyone?"

"Not yet! Everybody say, 'Send photo.' I send it, then no answer come back."

"Never mind!" commiserated Phil. "One of these days your picture will reach the right one and she'll think you're the only man on earth."

"Well,--she have to be pretty gol-darn quick now, for I'm all sick inside waiting."

"Meantime, hadn't you better get back to work, Sol?"

"Guess, maybe just as well."

He went into a corner, took off his glad rags, folded them and laid them carefully on a bench, then donned his working trousers, shirt and leather ap.r.o.n, and was soon swinging his hammer and making the sparks fly as if he had no other thought in the world but the welding of the iron he handled to its fore-ordained shape.

CHAPTER XII

The Dance

That night, Phil and Jim attired themselves in their best clothes and set out for the town hall. There was no missing the way, for Chinese lanterns and strings of electric lights led there, and all pedestrians were making for that important objective.

The two comrades were late in getting there; much too late to be partakers of the supper and listeners to the toasting and speech-making so dear to the hearts of politicians, aspiring politicians, lodge men, newspaper men, parsons, lawyers, ward-committee chairmen and the less pretentious, common-ordinary soap-box orator--whom no community is without. The long-suffering and patient public had evidently been hypnotised into putting up with the usual surfeit of lingual fare by the nerve-soothing influences of a preceding supper with a dance to follow.

Outside the town hall, horses, harnessed and saddled, lined the roadway, hitched to every available post, rail and tree in the vicinity. The side streets were blocked in similar fashion.

The hall inside was a blaze of coloured lights and was bedecked with flags and streamers. The orchestral part of the town band was doing its best. Everybody, his wife and his sweetheart, were conspicuously present, despite the fact that it was the height of the harvest season and most of them had been hard at work in the orchards since early morning, garnering their apple crops, and would have to be hard at it again next day, as if nothing had happened between times to disturb their evening's recuperations.

A number of dances had been gone through, evidently, for the younger ladies were seated round the hall, fanning themselves daintily, while the complexions of the more elderly of them had already begun to betray a perspiry floridness.

The men, young and old alike, mopping their moist foreheads with their handkerchiefs and straining at their collars in partial suffocation, crowded the corridors in quest of cooler air and an opportunity for a pipe or a cigarette. Only a few of the younger gallants lingered in the dance room to exchange pleasantries and bask for several precious extra moments in the alluring presence of some particular young lady with whom, for the time being, they were especially enamoured.

A cheery atmosphere prevailed; both political parties had buried their differences for the night. All were out for a good time and to do honour to the Valley's new parliamentary representative.

The men who congregated in the corridors presented a strange contrast; great broad fellows, polite of manner and speaking cultured English, in full evening dress but of a cut of the decade previous; others in their best blue serges; still others in breeches and leggings or puttees; while a few--not of the ballroom variety--refused to dislodge themselves from their sheepskin chaps, and jingled their spurs every time they changed position.

For the most part, the eyes of these men were clear and bright, and their faces were tanned to a healthy brown from long exposure to the Okanagan's perpetual sunshine. The pale-faced exceptions were the storekeepers, clerks, hotel-men and the bunco-dealers, like Rattlesnake Jim Dalton, who spent their days in the saloons and their nights at the card-tables.

The ladies, seated round the hall, compared favourably with their partners in point of healthy and virile appearance; and many of them, who a few years before, in their former homes in the East and in the Old Land, had not known what it meant to dry a dish, cook a meal or make a dress, who had trembled at the thought of a warm ray of G.o.d's blessed sunshine falling on their tender, sweet-milk complexions unless it were filtered and diluted through a parasol or a drawn curtain, now knew, from hard, honest experience, how to cook for their own household and, in addition, to cater for a dozen ever-hungry ranch hands and cattlemen:--knew not only how to make a dress but how to make one over when the necessity called for it; could milk the cows with the best of their serving-girls; could canter over the ranges, rope a steer and stare the blazing summer sun straight in the eye, with a laugh of defiance and real, live happiness.

The feminine hired-help chatted freely with their mistresses in a comradeship and a kind of free-masonry that only the hard battling with nature in the West could engender.

Phil was leaning idly against the door-post at the entrance to the dance-room, contemplating the kaleidoscope, when Jim's voice roused him.

"Phil,--I see your dear, dear friend, Mayor Brenchfield, is here."

"You've wonderful eyesight!" Phil answered. "Brenchfield is hardly the one to let anyone miss seeing him. His middle name is publicity, in capital letters."

"Little chatterbox Jenny Steele tells me he has had three dances out of the last five with Eileen Pederstone," was the next tantaliser.

"That shows his mighty good taste!"

"You bet it does! But he shows darned poor breeding, unless he's tied up to her."

"It is up to her, anyway, and maybe they are engaged," returned Phil, lightly enough.

"I don't doubt that he would like to be. Guess he will be too, sooner or later. Gee!" he continued in disgust, "I wish some son-of-a-gun would cut the big, fat, over-confident bluffer out."

"Why don't you have a try, Jim?" laughed his companion.

"Me? I never had a la.s.s in my life. I'm--I'm not a lady's man. They are all very nice to me, and all that; but I never feel completely comfortable unless it happens to be a woman who could be my great-grandmother."

"You're begging the question, Jim. Why don't you go over and claim a dance or two from Miss Pederstone, seeing you are so anxious over her and Brenchfield?"

"I would,--bless your wee, palpitating, undiscerning soul, but I don't dance."

"Go and talk to her, then."

"And have somebody come over and pick her up to dance with, from under my very nose? No, thanks! This is a dance, man; and the la.s.sies are here to dance. It would be ill of me to deprive her of all the fun she wants.

"You can dance, Phil? I know you can by the way you've been beating your feet every time the band plays. Go on, man!"

"I could dance, once," said Phil, "but----"