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The horses were driven down behind it, and from one of them de Spain took the collar, the tugs, and the whiffletree. He stuck a hitching-strap in his pocket, and while Morgan steadied the Lady's head, de Spain buckled the collar on her, doubled the tugs around the whiffletree, and fastened the roll at her side in front of the saddle. Nan came out and stood beside him as he worked.
The rough sympathy did me good, relaxed the tightness round my heart; the resentment natural to one entrapped left me, and some of my self- confidence returned: "I never felt less like joking in my life, Martin, and humour can't be produced to order." He fastened up the hitching-strap, while I gathered the reins together and got into the buggy.
"Good morning," I said in the air, but no one answered me. Mastering my irritation, I went forward to undo the hitching-strap, but Martin, divining my intention, rose and loosened the buckle. As I reached him, he spoke in a low whisper, keeping his back turned to me: "Shoot off a joke quick. The boys'll let up on you then. It'll be all right. Say somethin', for God's sake!"
One backed his vehicle as far as his hitching-strap would let him, against the wheels of another's buggy, that other immediately responding by a similar movement. Some of them turned their heads and challenged Hickory and Henry and the saddle-horse with speaking whinneys. "Whe-hee-hee-hee! You going to be tied up here for the grass-flies to bite too?
The body of a man, tied at the hands and heels behind with a hitching-strap, and with a linen carriage lap-cloth wound around his head and knotted, lay there endeavoring to ease the rigor of his position by some movement. We should now know, in a moment, what desperate thing had happened! I cut the strap, while Marquis got the lap-cloth unwound from about the man's head.
Perhaps he would remember that he had forgotten to put the hitching-strap in the back of the buggy on some recent occasion, and had been reprimanded by the doctor. Then these two would commune subtly and without words concerning their moon, holding themselves sympathetically as people who had committed similar treasons.
The occupant of the phaeton, a tall, handsome, well-preserved lady in middle life, with slightly gray hair, alighted briskly from the phaeton, tied the pony to the sapling with a hitching-strap, and advanced to the schoolhouse door. Rena wondered who the lady might be.
Clumsily and helplessly he loosened the tugs and the whiffletree, beat his hands together with idiotic effort, hooked the middle point of the whiffletree into the elbow of his left arm, brought the forearm and hand up flat against his shoulder, and with the hitching-strap lashed his forearm and upper arm tightly together around the whiffletree.
Lighter must have intended to spend a night on the road. And here is that second hitching-strap. Now, we are all right: the outfit is complete." He took the precaution to tie one of the horses before he commenced to unfasten the traces, and he worked swiftly, dexterously, while the girl watched him, directing him sometimes from her seat in the buggy.
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