“Will ye have the extrame nateness to rattle me off a breakdown, loively, ye moind?”
“I bet yer,” cried Pomp, and struck up that rattling old timer: “Did you ever see the devil?”
Away went Barney, rattling away in good time, and putting in some excellent steps, such as the beats and the rattlers, the straight fives and others.
The company went wild over him.
“Excellent,” cried Cheeky Charley.
“Bully,” said his more emphatic bride. “That Irish son of a sea cook can just everlastin’ly shake his foot. He can now, by thunder.”
Pomp got wound up and kept on going faster and faster, and then the half-tipsy Irishman put in all sorts of extra heel and toe flourishes.
The spectators grew excited, and their feet began to hitch uneasily.
In less than a minute Cheeky Charley and his bride were dancing a Western edition of the can-can, the white men were either clogging or jigging, and the redskins, male, female and papooses, went into a wild corn-feast dance, and such yells and cries, leaps and quirks, twists and bends, mixed up with half-drunken singing was never before seen and heard in the wide West, and still Pomp kept up his exhilarating tum-te-tum-tum.
They went perfectly wild, and cut up most comical figures as they danced around the drunken Irishman, who kept slinging his brogans in alarming style, but they were scattered like chaff when a succession of shrill whistles rang out close at hand, and with giant strides the Steam Horse and the Steam Man rushed pell-mell through the dancing crowd.