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"We had better get off at once while there's the sound to guide us." Alton laughed softly, as he did now and then when he might have been disconcerted. "I can't beat a Cayuse, Charley, and I don't think you'll hear them very long," he said. Tom of Okanagan grunted approval, and the three stood still, until the drumming of hoofs was lost in the silence of the bush. "They're gone," said Seaforth.
Every lead Robert had followed seemed to bring him to a blind wall. He rose restlessly and walked up and down the room, and then sat down again, drumming drearily on the arm of his chair. What now? What new line could he follow? By eliminating the servants, Tatsu, and himself, what remained? His guests.
It was the first time he had set foot there. So great was his luck at the time, that he had not been forced to go ashore in the usual way drumming up cargo. The shippers had come off begging him to become their carrier, and he had muleted them in heavy freights accordingly.
A faint staccato drumming that rose from the silent prairie throbbed through the final chords of it, and when the music ceased, swelled into the gallop of a horse. It seemed in some curious fashion portentous, and when there was a rattle and jingle outside other eyes than Winston's were turned towards the door. It swung open presently and Dane came in.
On a dead branch was Ya-rup the Flicker. He was using the hard shell of the dead branch for a drum. "Rat, a tat, tat," he went faster and faster, till the beats ran into one long resounding roll. Then he stopped and screamed, "Kee-yer, kee-yer!" Perhaps he meant, "Well done! good boy! good boy!" You see he had seen little Luke's battle with the blacksnake and was drumming and screaming for joy.
Since he was much in favour, many women would come and listen to his songs; also, they would dance before him to attract his attention. "Now it came to pass on a certain day that a young chief of another tribe happened by chance upon that way. Hearing the drumming, he resolved to find out what it was about.
But a faint animal scent crept to my nostrils, too, and there was a subdued stir about me, infinitely suggestive mysterious. Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder. A gong sounded. We stopped. The din of distant drumming came to my ears. "Where in Heaven's name are we?" hissed Smith in my ear; "that is a tom-tom!" "S-sh! S-sh!"
And his fingers kept drumming on the counterpane with a measured movement, as if keeping time with the trot of the charger he was riding in his vision. Gradually the motion became slower and slower as his words became more indistinct and he sank off into slumber. It ceased, and he lay motionless and still, as if the breath had left his body.
Through the heavy tropical rain which had been pouring almost incessantly since the arrival of the Sumter, covering the calm water of the harbour with little dancing jets, and drumming on the steamer's decks the most unmusical of tattoos, a little dingy was seen approaching, and in due time brought alongside of the Confederate man-of-war the master of a Baltimore brig, which, was lying at anchor some little distance off.
She would have screamed in the extremity of her terror, but that her voice for some seconds totally failed her; and recognising her brother, though like Rhoda, in Holy Writ, she doubted whether it was not his angel, she rose up, and with an awful ejaculation, she approached the window. 'Let me in, Radie; d you, let me in, he repeated, drumming incessantly on the glass.
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