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The clanking of the cog-wheels made his steps inaudible to the man who was manipulating the machinery in the hut as he entered and shot him dead. It was rather sickening, for the fellow pitched forward into the machinery and one arm became entangled there. But McKay, white of cheek and lip and fighting off a deathly nausea, checked the machinery and kicked the carrion clear.

Up the road there was a rattling and a clanking as though a thousand scythes were clashing together: an old cart with loose plank sides came slowly jolting along, drawn by the two most miserable moorland horses he had ever seen. On the driver's seat was an old peasant, who was bobbing about as though he would every moment fall in pieces, like all the rest of his equipment.

While the barge-master and the messenger from the Council still were engaged in hot talk as to which of the two conflicting orders should be recognised, there was the sound of tramping feet and of arms clanking; and then a body of fully one hundred soldiers came quickly from behind a house that was near by the water-side and swept down on a double-quick to where we were standing at the end of the pier.

Once in a while he would meet Gwenda Cartaret or overtake her on some road miles from Garth, and he would make her get up and drive on with him, or he would give her a lift home. It pleased her to be taken up and driven. She liked the rapid motion and the ways of the little brown horse. She even loved the noise he made with his clanking hoofs. Rowcliffe said it was a beastly trick.

Steam was then turned on, and with a great to-do of puffing and clanking, the Aurora started to haul herself up hand over hand, as one might say. Alas! she had no sooner raised her head than the hawser parted in the middle with a report like a small cannon, and she settled dejectedly back on the shoal. Captain Jack refreshed himself with a pull at the Spring Tonic bottle; and started all over.

But now we hear an ominous rattle, a clanking of chains, a rumbling as of distant thunder; we are approaching a shaft.

I have heard upwards of ten score of windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night, filling the Downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn hurriedly out of the ground at the first breath of his approach. Fortunately, his heart often fails him: he does not always blow home upon our exposed coast; he has not the fearless temper of his Westerly brother.

The foreman led Daddy Blake and the children to a big house, five times as large as the one where the Blake family lived. Running up to this ice house from the ground near the lake, was a long incline, like a toboggan slide, or a long wooden hill. And clanking up this wooden hill was an endless chain, with strips of wood fastened across it.

His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province, with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn off his convict shirt secured the end firmly. Other strips fastened it at intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the slack links from getting hooked in the bushes.

'This way, gentlemen, cried an old grey-haired man, running out towards us with hands outspread, and a bunch of keys clanking at his girdle. 'Oh hasten, gentlemen, if ye can indeed prevail over these lawless men! They have pulled down Saint Peter, and they will have Paul down too unless help comes. There will not be an apostle left. The east window is broken.