United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For months Pretoria has been our beacon, and at first it seemed quite an impossibly long way off. Looked at from Bloemfontein, across 300 miles of dreary veldt and rugged kopjes and steep-banked rivers, and allowing for the machinations and devilments of ten or fifteen thousand Boers, our arrival here did seem a vague, indefinite, and far-off prospect.
In his anger and triumph over her he devised the most cunning of all punishments; he told her of the movement's progress, of its ingeniously contrived devilments in store, of its inevitable success. What buildings and homes were to be bombed, the Cardew house first among them; what leading citizens were to be held as hostages, with all that that implied; and again the Cardews headed the list.
"Yer see, yer don't know much about red-skins and their devilments, and therefore, it's my private opine, instead of getting the gal, they'll git you, and there'll be the end on't." "Tim, couldn't yees make the s'arch wid me?" asked Teddy, in a deeply earnest voice. The trapper shook his head. "Like to do't, but can't. It's time I was up to the beaver runs this night and had my traps set.
Free, we won't say much for your inclinations, for maybe they are not the best; but here's bad luck to the fellow that doesn't think you good company; and here," added he, again filling his glass, "and here's may the devil take editors and authors and compositors, that won't let us alone, but must be taking our lives and our songs and our little devilments, that belongs to one's own family, and tell them all over the world.
"Can't always be sartin of that. Them varmints have ways of telegraphing ahead of ye to some of thar friends, so that ye'r'll run heels over head into some trap, onless yer understands thar devilments and tricky ways." "When we were in camp," said Fred, "we saw the smoke of a little fire near by. Was it yours?" "It war," replied Sut, with a curious solemnity. "I kindled that fire, and nussed it."
They were reckoned the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing devilments from his intestines. Now, sir, I've always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway. But by that time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet through my head.
"Be the powers, but ye know little of Injin devilments, as I've larned 'em from Soot Simpson. How do ye know but that's a thrick to make these Apaches belave that there's but a single Kiowa over there popping at them, when there may be half a hundred waiting for the chance to clean them out?" "Maybe that is Sut himself; you know you have been expecting him."
God could have nothing to do with their devilments, Seth said. Seth had great belief in God. One had maliciously torn up all the churches in a town by the roots, turned them upside down and stuck their steeples in the ground as if in mockery of religion. "Why do you call them cyclones?" the old man at the corner grocery had asked. "They are not cyclones. They are tornadoes."
He had acquired considerable experience and knowledge of Indian "devilments" on his way across the plains, and, if the Apaches comprehended the situation, it was not to be supposed that he was not posted fully as well. If he could see no chance of getting a pull at the rope, he could easily keep out of the way of the redskins.
"But it ain't likely," said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on his head, in the interest of self-possession, "that it's gone wrong. With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo't-night, it might a' been travellin' straight and not got the'a, yet. What d'you say was the address?" "Lower Merritt," said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. "Name?" persisted the man.
Word Of The Day