The Mystery at Bob-White Cave

put this table there for them. Jim, maybe you’d bring some of those camp chairs in from the porch.”
    Before long, the whole character of the lodge living room had changed. It looked just like an old-time Western dance hall.
    When the sun began to sink behind the pine-covered hills, the purple shadows lengthened, and Mrs. Moore pulled down the hanging kerosine lamps to light them. Then the first guests came. They were the Bill Hawkins family. The children, dressed to starched discomfort, got down from the wagon and waited, silently and timidly, till their father unhitched his mules, put feed in the wagon, and came up to the house. Then they passed single file through the doorway.
    The Bob-Whites, glad to see the children, greeted the family warmly, and soon they seemed quite at home in the lodge.
    One after another, other neighbors came, till soon the big room overflowed. Mothers lined up against one wall, as Linnie had predicted, babies in their laps, and chatted happily. In the corner, playing cards snapped as the men played their game. Young people the ages of the Bob-Whites clapped enthusiastically as the last wagon arrived and the musicians came up, one with a concertina, one with a guitar, and a third with a fiddle. The fiddler led a fourth man by the arm, as he was blind, and half a dozen people ran forward to lead him to a seat. Blindness hadn’t taken away his spirit, however, and he tapped his foot to the tempo as the musicians swung into a tune.
    The man with the concertina jumped to the middle of the floor to summon young people for a dance. “First thing, we’ll dance the hall!” he announced. Everyone began to stomp. The women cuddled their babies and stomped. The men at the card table stomped. The children playing around the room and in the kitchen stomped. Stomping to the tune, Jim led Trixie to the center of the circle that formed. Then, as Jim and Trixie danced, the circling couples clapped their hands and sang,
 
“Lost my sweetheart, skip to my Lou,
Lost my sweetheart, skip to my Lou,
Lost my sweetheart, skip to my Lou,
Skip to my Lou, my darling!
 
“Skip to my Lou, skip to my Lou,
Skip to my Lou, skip to my Lou,
When you’re through, remember my call,
Change partners now and waltz the hall.”
     
    As the man with the concertina called the changes, Jim and Trixie retired to the outer circle and another couple took their place. This continued till all the pairs had “waltzed the hall.”
    In the kitchen, Mrs. Moore had pitchers of lemonade waiting, and colas were cooling in the spring. Linnie and Honey and Trixie carried trays of paper cups to the older people in the big room, and the dance started again.
 
“Put your little foot,
Put your little foot,
Put your little foot
Right there!
 
“Take a step to the side,
Take a step to the rear,
Put your little foot right down,
And forever stay near!”
     
    For the laughing, shouting, dancing young people, the musicians then bounced out “Black-Eyed Susie,” “Sugar in My Coffee,” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”
    “I wish the gang at Sleepyside High could hear these boys,” Mart whispered to Jim. “They really lay it on the line, don’t they?” And Mart, who had only lately learned to dance, whirled out onto the floor with Linnie as his partner.
    Meantime, a big moon hovered outside the open doors and windows, turning the outdoors to silver. In the yard, Uncle Andrew busily swished about with a spray gun, killing lurking mosquitoes and chiggers. The boys started smudges going, then spread blankets on the grass and took out several camp chairs for the older people and one for the blind man.
    When the guests swooped out of doors, the fun went on. The dancing was over, but the blind man borrowed the fiddler’s fiddle, laid it across his knee, and drew out sweet music to accompany his thin voice.
    He sang ballads that found their way to the Ozark hills when English-born settlers came from the southern states; French songs that were inherited from voyageurs who explored the long rivers in far-off days and tarried to become the ancestors of the people who sat now in Andrew Belden’s yard.
    In the lodge clearing, tucked away in the friendly hills, a cool breeze came up from Lake Wamatosa while the people under the starlight sang and traded stories of witches and “haunts.”
    Mrs. Moore went into the house to make fresh lemonade and to bring out some cakes she had baked. Trixie followed to help. Everyone called to Linnie to sing, so,