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"Hold her tight, and run her down the middle!" shouted the voice of the caller-out. "Over to Watts's last fall," Mrs. Luella rambled on, slicing ham the while at a great rate, "they had bun sandwiches, and in the top of ary bun there was a toothpick stickin' up. If you've got toothpicks enough about the place, we might try it. It looks real tasty." "Mrs.
They were still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The "caller-out," stationed between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task.
"Didn't I see it, though?" scoffed Joe, in high spirits, and Lem knew that he had blundered. A new caller-out had taken the floor, and was shouting, "Seventeen to twenty-four, get on the floor and dance!" The pauses are short at a ranch dance, for each man, having a right in only one dance out of three or four, is eager for his turn.
When the favorite figure of the "Bird in the Cage" was danced, and the caller-out shouted, "Bird flies out, and the crow flies in," everybody in the room, cried "Caw! caw!" in excellent imitation of the sable-hued fowl thereby typified, and the dancers, conscious of an admiring public, "swung" and "sashayed" with increased vehemence.
The "lucky gentleman" generally buys one unless he has a Semitic trace in his veins. Then another collection is made, a school formed, and they carry on with the game. The caller-out has many nicknames for the numbers such as "Kelly's Eye" for one, "Leg's Eleven" for eleven, "Clickety-click" for sixty-six, or "Top of the house" meaning ninety. The game is honest and quite enjoyable.
She always spoke of Lem as the "little chap," though he was in fact precisely of a height with his brother; and she gave as the reason for the preference, that "the little chap wasn't a ramper." Unfortunately for Lem, perhaps, she was right. He was not a ramper. As Lem stepped out into the other room, the caller-out was shouting, "Promen-ade all you know where!"
The fiddles had fallen into a more sentimental strain; hints of "The Mocking Bird" might be heard struggling for utterance in the strings. In this ambitious attempt the pitch would get lower and lower, and then recover itself with a queer falsetto effect. Charley Leroy, the crack "bronco-buster" of the region, was caller-out this time.
The caller-out for the moment was a curly-headed lad of twenty, with a shrewd, good-humored face. He stood in a slouching attitude, one shoulder much higher than the other, and as he gave forth, in a singsong voice, his emphatic rhymed directions, his fingers played idly with the red-silk lacings of his brown flannel shirt.
As they danced they sang, joining with the "caller-out," who held his vociferous post between the rooms, till the room was full of singing, dancing men and women, who spun and pirouetted as if they had not a care in the world. But Texas Tyler was not of these, as he looked through the dancers for his man.
Toward three o'clock Joe was again dancing with Quinn's Aggy, and as the caller-out chanted: "Swing that girl, that pretty little girl, That girl you left behind you!" he advanced toward her with an air of mock gallantry. At the same moment Bub Quinn stalked into the middle of the set, a sombrero planted firmly on his head, a long cowhide whip in his hand.
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