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Guarded by two pikemen, stood the cripple his teeth set firmly, although his lips quivered with excitement his light eyes glaring fiercely around with an air of savage exultation, and gleaming, as it were, with a pale phosphoric fire, from out of the dark ground of his swarthy face and lank black hair.
"If only I could have gold enough," he muttered, "I'd sell my soul for it." Whiz! came something down the chimney. The general was dazzled by a burst of sparks, from which stepped forth a lank personage in black velvet with clean ruffles and brave jewels. "Talk quick, general," said the unknown, "for in fifteen minutes I must be fifteen miles away, in Portsmouth."
He kept his reputation sprouting new shoots right along and that ain't all joke, neither." "Speakin' in general, could he beat you to it with a gun, Pat?" "Speaking in general I reckon he could." "Them rurales are kind of careless ridin' over the line and not stoppin' by to make a little explanation." The lank man nodded. "There's a time coming when they'll do more than that.
When I got there I was fortunate in encountering a lank, easy-going old fellow who had been commandeered for the job owing to the departure of all the local police for the war. He was clearly more interested in trying to find out something of his relations in some remote village in America, which he said was named after them, than in my business.
"Y-you, Dud Hollister an' Tom Reeves, I'm servin' a subpoena on you lads as w-witnesses at a w-weddin'," he said in the high wheeze that sounded so funny coming from his immense bulk. "Whose wedding?" demanded Reeves, a lank youth with a brick-red face, the nose of which had been broken. "N-none of yore darned business." "Do we get to kiss the bride?"
He was a tall, lank, powerful fellow; anyone acquainted with the West-country would have known him for one of the swarthy, gray-eyed Cornish stock. "I am pretty busy but your tale, Herbert, was a startler. If I can help you or Barnes command me. He is coming this afternoon?" Herbert French pointed his visitor to a chair. "Of course.
He had a broad chest and square shoulders, but the lower parts of his body were lank and wasted, though nervous; and this discrepancy in a physical organization evidently once perfect puzzled the mind which endeavored to explain this anomalous figure by some possible singularities of the man's life.
The yellow grains of wheat that lay everywhere in the field were fine food, and should have made the little Shanghais as fat as the Grouse who sometimes stole out from the edge of the forest. Eleven of the brood were quite plump, but one Chicken was still thin and lank. His mother was very much worried about him and could not think what was the matter.
As he leaned over the insensible man, his light, bleary eyes gleaming with ferocious satisfaction, his lank, shambling figure, and yellow, matted hair hanging in elf locks round his sharp visage, he looked like an unclean bird of prey hovering over a carcase.
Our chronicler, who has an eye for the telling phrase, describes him as "a tall, lank, empty-bowelled, tobacco- spurting Southerner, with eyes like burning black balls, who could talk a company of listeners into an insane asylum quicker than any man in California, and whose blasphemy could not be equalled, either in quantity or quality, by the most profane of any age or nation."
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