upon his own
pleasure. A wave of warmth and light swept upon them, and a blare of
music, and a stir and hum of voices, and here and there the sweet sound
of a happy girl's laughter. They raised their heads, these two wild
rangers of the mountain-desert, and breathed deep of the fantastic
scene.

It was marvelous, indeed, that so much gay life could exist within the
arms of those gaunt, naked hills beyond the windows. There was no
attempt at beauty in the costumes of the masqueraders. Here and there
some girl achieved a novel and pleasing effect; but on the whole they
strove for cheaper and more stirring things in the line of the
grotesque.

Here passed a youth wearing a beard made from the stiff, red bristles
of the tail of a sorrel horse. Another wore a bear's head cunningly
stuffed, the grinning teeth flashing over his head and the skin draped
over his shoulders. A third disfigured himself horribly by painting
after the fashion of an Indian on the war-path, with crimson streaks
down his forehead and red and black across his cheeks.

But not more than a third of all the assembly made any effort to
masquerade, beyond the use of the simple black mask across the upper
part of the face. The rest of the men and women contented themselves
with wearing the very finest clothes they could afford to buy, and
there was through the air a scent of the general merchandise store
which not even a liberal use of cheap perfume and all the drifts of
pale-blue cigarette smoke could quite overcome.

As for the music, it was furnished by two very old men, relics of the
days when there were contests in fiddling; a stout fellow of middle
age, with cheeks swelled almost to bursting as he thundered out
terrific blasts on a slide trombone; a youth who rattled two sticks on
an overturned dish-pan in lieu of a drum, and a cornetist of real skill.

In an interlude, before very long, he would amuse with a solo,
including all sorts of runs and whistling notes, and be a source of
talk for many a month to come.

There were hard faces in the crowd, most of them, of men who had set
their teeth against hard weather and hard men, and fought their way
through, not to happiness, but to existence, so that fighting had
become their pleasure.

Now they relaxed their eternal vigilance, their eternal suspicion.
Another phase of their nature weakened. Some of them were smiling and
laughing for the first time in months, perhaps, of bitter labor and