So at Mrs. Mary Ann's it was that all the miscellaneous crowd of the sale-yards foregathered. They danced until the blood boiled under weather-beaten, leathern faces, and the rising sweat left furrows in the dust of the road on them. Matted, lank, sun-bleached hair lay in wet streaky locks on foreheads marked with the line of hats that almost grew on them—the line beyond which the sunburn never travelled. Men, women, boys and girls of all ages, children, grandfathers and grandmothers, Pat danced them all to a state of breathless exhaustion.
As he tucked his fiddle under his chin and raked it with his long bow, his eyes gleamed with mischief and merriment. His arm went backwards and forwards so dexterously, with such agility, that the gay airs he played possessed him as well as everyone who heard them. Old men and women left their benches by the wall and skipped and trundled until the pine floor shook.
The only people who were not dancing were a young mother with a baby in her arms and a teamster too drunk to do more than hang by the doorpost. He attempted a few wild and hilarious movements, fell headlong and was dragged feet foremost to the door and thrown out, because he cumbered the floor. The young mother joggled her baby and sang softly in tune to Pat's music, enfolding the assembled company and Pat himself in her beaming smile.
It was incense to Pat's soul to see everybody within earshot moving. The clatter, rhythmic lift, shuffle and thump of heavily-shod feet was as good to his ears as any of the old airs he played.
His arm flying quicker and quicker, sent old and young along with the strain of his music, like corks on a stream. Heads bobbed, feet stamped busily. A catch of laughter flew out. The elderly, stout mother of a family called breathlessly: "Stop it, Pat! Stop it, ye villain!" But Pat only laughed and his fiddle arm flew faster, till the dancers dropped exhausted against the wall, or hung there gasping with a stitch in their sides. When he had tired them all out, he lifted his bow with a flourish and a shout of laughter.
The two that kept the floor longer than most others were Jess—Ross's Jess, as she was called—and young Davey Cameron. They were reckoned a fine pair of dancers. Pat had great pride in them. When everybody else had left the floor he made the pace faster and faster for them, till they whirled to a finish, watched and cheered by the crowd against the walls. Off-scourings and derelicts of the Wirree, whom Mrs. Hegarty would not have to dance in her parlour, had to amuse themselves by looking in the doorway, or by jigging as best they might out of doors under the star-strewn sky.
It was that night of the November sales, when Pat was at Hegarty's, that the Schoolmaster and Deirdre came back to the Wirree.
They put up at the Black Bull, and it was not until the dance was in full swing that they appeared in Mrs. Hegarty's doorway. Pat was speeding up a reel, his eyes kindling.
"Faith, it's a drop of the craythur you want to waken you up, Mick Ross," he called.
Catching up the air of his tune, he sang gaily, and the company joined in breathlessly at the top of its lungs.