Free Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden Page A

her family. “The low ceilings—the log walls—dimly lighted by kerosene lamps—the musicians huddled over their fiddles, playing the strangest music,and the oddly dressed couples whirling through the steps of the square dances which are the popular thing here. . . . One dark complexioned cow puncher leaned against the door jamb calling the figures.” They played quadrilles, waltzes, and two-steps, and she and Dorothy had more partners than they could count. “Bob Perry (whose sister I knew slightly at Smith) was there and so nice to us. He whisked us through the quadrille in great shape.” Still, she added, “Mr. C.,” for the first time dressed up in a white shirt and tie, “was a better dancer than Mr. P.”
    Ros was aware that, even in that peculiar locale, she was acting the part of a traditional debutante. Ferry’s party was far more diverting than the balls at the Owasco Country Club, but she couldn’t take seriously most of the men who presented themselves to her. One bachelor, a pig farmer named Roy Lambkin, asked her to be his company at supper. Lambkin had helped Carpenter break up his land and plant crops in his early years as a homesteader. “I had to lay down the law to him later,” she wrote, “and assure him that schoolmarms hadn’t a moment to themselves—Sundays were our busiest days!” She didn’t add that the afternoons were reserved, after church, for Bob and Ferry.
    Twenty-four-year-old Everette Adair, the son of the wealthy rancher John Adair, was especially persistent. The object of frequent jokes between Ros and Dorothy about his flamboyant style of dress and his flashy rings, he showed up at the house a few weeks later, leading two horses. When they consulted with Mrs. Harrison about the propriety of going riding with him, he poked his head inside and answered for her: “They will be just as safe as tho they were in the arms of Jesus.” Still, as Dorothy put it after the party, the real “belle of the ball” was Carpenter’s newly installed bathroom. Ferry wrote more graphically , “Everywhere guests rushed up to me and said: ‘Happy Birthday! Show me the flush toilet!’ ”
    At midnight, Mrs. Murphy served a supper of sandwiches, cake, and ice cream outside. Afterward, fueled by food and coffee, the dancers picked up the pace, and the fiddlers started a double quick.“How I wish you could have seen us madly dancing around those two small low-ceilinged rooms!” Dorothy wrote to her father. Ferry, in a letter to his parents, said that it was the fastest music he had ever “stepped to, ” but his partner was Annie Elmer, the prize hay pitcher of Morgan Bottom—the productive flat land just north of the Yampa River—and they had no trouble keeping up. “Round and round we tore—it was fine with the floor all to ourselves—an occasional whoop or yell of encouragement as ‘Stay with ’em Tex’ or ‘Go to it Ferry,’ & soon we all had our coats off & the sweat a rolling off of us—well there were no quitters & after nearly an hour the musicians gave it up & slowed down to a last step & quit amid much shouting & clapping.”
    By daybreak, the babies were asleep in their mothers’ arms; most of the older children were piled upstairs in the loft on some bedding Ferry had strewn about. But Tommy Jones was still wide awake at five A.M. He told Ros, “ ’Ere were ’ifteen auto ’ere ’at night!” She commented, “He can’t talk any other way but he’s cute as he can be.” At six-thirty, the musicians played “Home Sweet Home,” and people began getting into their rigs and autos. The two women rode wearily home and slept until noon.
    Dorothy wrote to her father that it was “a never-to-be-forgotten experience,” an impression Ros confirmed over sixty years later, when she said that as they rode back to the Harrisons’, she realized it was “the first time in my life that I’d seen the sun set, moon rise, the moon set, and the sun rise all in one