United States or New Zealand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I must have stared at Macartney like a fool, but he had knocked the wind clean out of me as to Collins having been the man in the swamp. With only two hours' start neither he nor Dunn, nor any man, for matter of that, could have legged it over my road in time to lie up in the only place I knew some one had laid up, on the corduroy road.
"It's because I'm blond," said Andrews. "There are plenty of blond Frenchmen, aren't there?" Rosaline ran off giggling, and came back in a moment with a pair of corduroy trousers and a torn flannel shirt that smelt of pipe tobacco. "That'll do for now," she said. "It's warm today for April. Tonight we'll buy you some clothes and shoes. Where are you going?" "By God, I don't know."
In the corner near the big window a group of women, some in white duck, some in khaki or corduroy, sat chatting and enjoying the scene. No one paid the least attention to the newcomer. The tough-looking driver of the hack dropped the suit case near the desk with a bang and turned to reply to a good-natured remark addressed to him by a jovial, well-dressed man standing near.
Ten minutes later he emerged with bag, hat, and stick. The last item of corduroy had vanished from his apparel. He was quietly dressed, as an exploiter of the masses or a mechanic. He set the bag on the desk, and going to a window peered from behind the curtain into the street. "Some of those rowdies are still prowling about," he said, "but there are cabs directly across the street."
The fish are very abundant in the rivers, and no great skill is required in their capture. Men with an air of veracity told me they had seen streams in the interior of Kamchatka so filled with salmon that one could cross on them as on a corduroy bridge! The story has a piscatorial sound, but it may be true. House gardening on a limited scale is the principal agriculture of Kamchatka.
He wore tags of yarn round his trousers beneath the knee, that looked like ostentatious garters, and frequently his jacket of corduroy was put on beneath his waistcoat. If he was too old to carry his load on his back, he wheeled it on a creaking barrow, and when he met a friend they said, "Ay, Jeames," and "Ay, Davit," and then could think of nothing else.
I hadn't no time to feel real lonesome now, for all our things hed got to be onpacked, and packed over ag'in in the wagon; some on 'em had to be stored up, so's to come another time. We was two days gettin' to the claim, the roads was so bad, mostly what they call corduroy, but a good stretch clear mud-holes.
"This asphalt paving makes a great motor track," Bryce said to me, "but there's speed-laws in existence here. That's the trouble of it. When a man has a nice track he's interfered with, and when there isn't anyone to meddle with him it's ten to one that he's crawling over something like a corduroy road." "Corduroy!" I said, and sat up and looked at him. I knew what he meant.
It shone upon bandannas and yellow neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon black-haired girls mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and rag-pickers staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step. Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and gambling there.
We are a notable people for our attachment to the frying-pan, and there is no doubt that it is a shifty utensil: it can be slung at the saddle-bow or carried in a valise, it will bear the jolting of a corduroy road, and furnish a camp-mess in the minimum of time out of material that was perhaps but a moment before sniffing or pecking at its rim.
Word Of The Day