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They're very pretty. It's just in here." She rose as she spoke, with a gesture of the hand toward the ball-room. He followed, because she led the way, but without seeing the meaning of the move until they were actually on the polished dancing-floor. Owing to the darkness of the December afternoon, the large empty room was lit up as brilliantly as at night.
And this rat was a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse death in many horrible forms.
When Burning Daylight went on the tear, no man cared to miss it. The dancing-floor was full. Owing to the shortage of women, many of the men tied bandanna handkerchiefs around their arms in token of femininity and danced with other men.
He was, in point of fact, a waiter, and he comes into the story at this point bearing a tray full of glasses, knives, forks, and pats of butter on little plates. He was setting a table for some new arrivals, and in order to obtain more scope for that task he had left the crowded aisle beyond the table and come round to the edge of the dancing-floor.
He passed through the swinging gate in the railing which separated the dancing-floor from the tables and went up to the line of girls, sitting in that saddest waiting of all the world, along the wall. There was an ominous silence at his approach. He planted himself in front of the girl with eyes like Anna Klein. "Are you going to dance?" "Not with you," she replied, evenly.
They borrowed a seven-pounder from the Gunners, and wreathed it with laurels, and made the dancing-floor plate-glass and provided a supper, the like of which had never been eaten before, and set two sentries at the door of the room to hold the trays of programme-cards. My friend, Private Mulvaney, was one of the sentries, because he was the tallest man in the regiment.
Then the introducer manufactured a name for the pretty young girl, the music started up, and the next moment she was gliding over the perfect dancing-floor in the embrace of this strange fellow. Is that all? Not by any means. He invited her to an innocent dish of ice-cream. We watched our opportunity, and, between dances, when no one was taking notice, we whispered the word of warning.
The Inexpressibles gave a ball. They borrowed a seven-pounder from the Gunners, and wreathed it with laurels, and made the dancing-floor plate-glass, and provided a supper, the like of which had never been eaten before, and set two sentries at the door of the room to hold the trays of programme-cards.
"'Och! me darlin' pracher, may ye niver be done!" We all agreed that we should like to reconstruct the scene for a moment and look at a drawing-room of two hundred years ago, when the Lady Lieutenant after the minuets at eleven o'clock went to her basset table, while her pages attended behind her chair, and when on ball nights the ladies scrambled for sweetmeats on the dancing-floor.
Unless destroyed by man, they live on indefinitely until burned, smashed by lightning, or cast down by storms, or by the giving way of the ground on which they stand. The age of one that was felled in the Calaveras Grove, for the sake of having its stump for a dancing-floor, was about 1300 years, and its diameter, measured across the stump, 24 feet inside the bark.
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