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Suddenly he whooped and August Naab hauled back the gate, and the two horses, neck and neck, thundered out upon the level stretch. "Good!" cried August. "Let him rip now, Navvy. All over but the work, Jack. I feared Silvermane would spear himself on some of those dead cedar spikes in the corral. He's safe now."
I know dang well whar I'D hit fer if I was makin' a gitaway 'n' didn't come off over here 'n' I shore would keep outa Navvy country, now I'm tellin' yuh! No, sir, I'd take out t'other way, through Hell Canon er Tijeras, 'n' I'd make fer the Jemes country.
Afterwards, the little Bushman, who crouched over the fire, sat up suddenly, listening. "Ha! what is that?" he said. A Bushman is like a dog: his ear is so fine he knows a jackal's tread from a wild dog's. "I heard nothing," said the navvy. "I heard," said the Hottentot; "but it was only a cony on the rocks."
The right reverend father in God, Cocker, has gnawed away the Old Testament: the Oxford doctors are nibbling away the New: nothing escapes but the apocrypha: yet these same skeptics believe the impudent lies, and monstrous arithmetic of geology, which babbles about a million years, a period actually beyond the comprehension of the human intellect; and takes up a jaw-bone, that some sly navvy has transplanted over-night from the churchyard into Lord knows what stratum, fees the navvy, gloats over the bone, and knocks the Bible down with it.
He was obviously a member of some profession connected with coal-dust, and it was plain that he had been celebrating the conclusion of his day's labours. The smaller navvy, thus exhorted, administered the desired clip. It was not a particularly severe one, but it drew from its recipient the somewhat unexpected expostulation "You silly ass! Not so hard!"
The navvy took the place of the Indian, pick and shovel and theodolite the place of bow and musket, and a lower freight by a cent on a bushel of wheat became the ammunition in place of the former glass beads or fire-water.
Futility was written over the Temple of Endeavour, and by-and-by Dimsdale lost hope and health and heart. He had Nilotic fever, he had ophthalmia; and hot with indomitable will, he had striven to save one great basin from destruction, for one whole week, without sleeping or resting night and day: working like a navvy, sleeping like a fellah, eating like a Bedouin. Then the end came.
But when, after long endurance of his jealousy and brutality, after being watched like a prisoner and beaten like a slave, the wretched woman at length took refuge in a convent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds; and he summoned the French Government, despite his old quarrel with it, to kidnap and send back the woman over whom he had no legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death.
He felt weak and sore, and the pain of his smashed knuckles warned him that, even if he could find a job at navvy work, it would be a week before he could grip a pick handle or a shovel. The hunger palpitation at the pit of the stomach was sickening. His wretchedness overwhelmed him, and into his eyes came an unwonted moisture.
A drinking-room with a blue or a brown curtain would offer no attraction to the thirsty navvy who likes to have his thirst indulged without criticism. But, in spite of the red curtain, Fenwick entered the house, and asked the uncomely woman at the bar after Sam Brattle. Was there a man named Sam Brattle staying there; a man with a sister?
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