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Butefish after much mental travail, requesting the pleasure of the Toomeys' company at a reception and dance in the Prouty House to celebrate the third year of the town's prosperity and progress was one of the results of this meeting of the Boosters Club.
Toomey experienced when she saw her trunk going was surpassed only by the astonishment of the neighbors, who all but broke the glass in their various windows as they pressed against it to convince themselves that the sight was not an optical illusion. The Toomeys had traveled in a stateroom, over Mrs.
Her humor was of the western flavor droll exaggeration a little grim, while in her unexpected turns of speech, Prentiss found a constant source of entertainment. He had told her of the Toomeys and the circumstances in which they had met; also of the letter endeavoring to interest him in the irrigation project. "Do you know them?" he had asked, and she had replied merely, "Somewhat."
Then she felt an arm about her shoulder and herself being drawn close against her father's heart as he exclaimed brokenly: "My baby-girl, grown up! My Kate!" After an absence from Prouty of several weeks, Kate stepped off the train alone one afternoon and furnished the town with the liveliest sensation of its kind that it had known since the Toomeys had gone "on East."
She was "green," he could not deny that, yet not in the sense the Toomeys meant. Naïve, ingenuous, he felt were better words. She knew nothing of social usages, and she was without a suspicion of the coquetry that he looked for in girls before they had begun to do up their hair. She spoke with startling frankness upon subjects which he had been taught were taboo.
He arrived in time to see the lid of the priceless heirloom disappearing in a puddle of pewter. It seemed to the Toomeys that the Fates had singled them out as special objects for their malevolence. The wind continued to blow as though it meant never to stop. It was a wind of which the people of the East who speak awesomely of their own "gales" and "tempest" wot not.
Speaking colloquially, the Toomeys were "ga'nted considerably," and in their usual state of semistarvation, but were in no immediate danger of freezing, owing to the fact that Toomey had succeeded in exchanging a mounted deer head for four tons of local coal mined from a "surface blossom," which was being exploited by the Grit as one of the country's resources.
The reply that he was going to his daughter's ranch was on his tongue's end, but something checked it the recollection perhaps of the singular change which had come over Kate's face at the mention of the Toomeys' name; instead, he expressed his appreciation of the proffered hospitality and courteously refused.
The Major's brow cleared as Jasper Toomey swung round the corner by the Prouty House and clattered down the main street sitting high-headed and arrogant in a Brewster cart. Spent money like a prince he did. A few more people like the Toomeys and the future of the country was assured.
If the waltz and the polka and schottische sent her blood racing under such adverse conditions, what must it be like on a real floor with real music, she asked herself ecstatically. These dancing lessons were provocative of much merriment and teasing from the Toomeys. While Hugh did not resent it or defend Kate, he did not join in their ridicule of her.
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