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At length the sun, not like the rosy-fingered Aurora, daughter of the dawn, but like a huge red monster intent on devouring the world, shoots at us his blighting, withering lances of scorching heat. We touch once more at Plymouth, which greets us with its usual entertainment of murderous fleas, death-dealing watermelons and chain-lightning whiskey.
Olie and Dinky-Dunk talk about summer-fallowing and double-discing and drag-harrowing and fire-guarding, and I'm beginning to understand what it all means. They are out with their teams all day long, working like Trojans. We have mid-day dinner, which Olie bolts in silence and with the rapidity of chain-lightning.
He stirred in his seat nervously. "Why, fifty, about," he answered with confusion. "Then you'll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards, when they're few at the best," she said with a gentle and dangerous smile. "Fifty-why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded with an uncertain laugh. "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing pitchforks and chain-lightning.
From the descriptive catalogue he gave of his own merits, the passengers gathered that he was "a roarer," "a regular bruiser," "half alligator, half steamboat, half snapping-turtle, with a leetle dash of chain-lightning thrown in," and were evidently afraid of him; when the Judge, who had been quietly smoking on the deck, stepped out upon the quay, and, approaching the bully, said, with a peculiarly dry manner,
The storm seemed to be working up astern of us, for presently a dazzlingly vivid flash of chain-lightning rent the darkness over our weather quarter, quickly followed by a deep, hollow, reverberating peal of thunder that rumbled like the echo of a seventy-four's broadside.
Meanwhile the mutterings of the distant thunder had gradually grown louder and drawn nearer, while sudden, vivid flashes of forked or chain-lightning, golden, violet, or delicate rose-tinted, darted at ever-lessening intervals from the lowering masses of intensely black cloud heaped up along the western horizon.
Almost every white man in this town sold chain-lightning whiskey, and in our short walk from dance hall to hotel we were obliged to jump over the prostrate forms of drunken darkies.
"I'd go over and ride with Guerin, but I'm afraid he wouldn't take it well. That engine is as quick as chain-lightning, and with a greasy rail like this she'll slip going down hill, and the more throttle he gives her the slower she'll go.
When the first social cloud appeared on the horizon indicating the approach of a series of showers for the bride which would culminate in a cloudburst at some stone church, Miss Larrabee would begin to rumble like distant thunder and, as the storm grew thicker, she would flash out crooked chain-lightning imprecations on the heads of the young people, their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts.
Anyhow, I found myself riding away straight south as if I were on a streak of chain-lightning. This would not do, so I pulled with all my strength and tried to turn him. I might as well have tried to turn a steamboat by saying "haw!" and "gee!" to it. But the pulling on the big curb-bit made him mad and he stopped and began to buck.
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