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It lurched and dipped toward the windows like a huge sable hawk about to swoop down on a chicken yard. "A-h-h-h!" gasped the startled watcher, pointing in horror. "Wh-h-s-s-ss!" The gruesome apparition uttered a sighing, hissing sound which increased in a weird, half-muffled whistle. Simultaneous with the whistle it darted to the nearest candle, extinguishing it with one whining "Puf-f-f!"
The dugout we occupied we had built ourselves, and we took great pains to make it as roomy and comfortable as possible; hence the tendency of the fellows to make it their rendezvous. Our bunks consisted of sandbags spread out on the floor, and the ceremony of retiring occupied about one minute or less. A half-muffled shriek woke me from a sound sleep and brought me bolt upright in the bunk.
The beast jumped ahead. Van Horn, laughing, held on. But the shock jerked him almost from his feet. As he staggered forward, clinging to the rearing animal, the half-muffled report of a revolver was heard. Almost like a thunderbolt, it changed the situation. One of the Texas men had fired in the air, but no one had seen him fire and the other Texans jumped like longhorns.
He came from a long line of shepherds, and shepherding was perhaps almost instinctive in him; from his earliest boyhood the tremulous bleating of the sheep and half-muffled clink of the copper bells and the sharp bark of the sheep-dog had a strange attraction for him.
As we became accustomed then to the yellow darkness, we beheld about the landscape a spectral look, and the sepulchral sound of the moving thunder seemed the half-muffled clang of some great iron-tongued funeral bell.
A half-muffled noise of light wheels interrupted him. Boldwood turned back into the road. It was the mail-cart a crazy, two-wheeled vehicle, hardly heavy enough to resist a puff of wind. The driver held out a letter. Boldwood seized it and opened it, expecting another anonymous one so greatly are people's ideas of probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.
Her lips indeed were quite drawn and most flagrantly set with the expression of one who, having something determinate to say, will yet say it, somewhere, sometime, somehow, though the skies fall and all the waters of the earth dry up. Then like the dart of a bird, she flashed to her father's door and opened it. "Father!" she whispered. "Father!" "Yes," answered the half-muffled, pillowy voice.
This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more out to sea.
Finally, realizing that he must have rest if Rhoda was not to repeat her previous experience in leading him across the desert he stretched himself on the ground across the head of the trail. He must trust to his nervousness to make him sleep lightly. How long she had slept Rhoda did not know when she was wakened by a half-muffled oath from DeWitt. She jumped to her feet and ran out to the terrace.
Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it has a half-muffled, smothered sound.
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