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There was something indescribably nerve-shaking and menacing in that constant mutter, which seemed to shape itself into the very syllables of the half-breed, endlessly repeated, "We will kill you if we can. We will kill you if we can." No one ever moved in the silent woods.
It is built for the purpose of solitary confinement for life. A gallows is a much less nerve-shaking spectacle than one of these awful cells, and assuredly, when imprisonment therein for life is substituted for death, it is no mercy to the criminal; but if it be a greater terror to the citizen, it may answer the purpose better.
The dread of this unknown Bright One, which was plainly capable of devouring them all if Grôm should lose control of it, was more nerve-shaking than their dread of the beast-men. Moreover, there was the natural reluctance to leave the old, familiar dwellings for an unknown, distrusted land, confessedly the haunt of those monstrous beasts which they had most cause to fear.
Captain Reece was now up there, and the bullets were whizzing about and thudding into the logs in a nerve-shaking manner. "Crouch down, men, till they are a bit tired of wasting their cartridges," said the captain, standing erect himself, however; "you could not get a fair shot yet for the smoke." When they had done so, he sat on a block of wood himself, and was then protected by the balcony.
With hat pulled over his eyes and hands immersed in the pockets of his coat, he made his way through the throng, while the raucous voices of news-venders cried out the latest tidings from the front. To escape the proximity of the crowds and the nerve-shaking noises of traffic, he turned down a wide thoroughfare, and eventually emerged on Fleet Street.
But this man, who would stake his existence on a whim with a bitter and jeering recklessness, stood in mortal fear of imprisonment. He had an unreasoning cold-sweat, nerve-shaking, blood-to-water-turning sort of horror at the bare possibility of being locked up the sort of terror a superstitious man would feel at the thought of being embraced by a spectre.
Instantly the place was in an uproar. Of course, the doctor felt nothing of the prickling, nerve-shaking pain that gripped every one of those barefoot men. They leaped and darted here and there, bluish sparks flashing wherever they touched the iron; or they fell after a step or two and writhed on the floor, shrieking and cursing with the exquisite torture of that awful current.
He paused and Thirlwell made a sign of sympathy. "A nerve-shaking jar! But what became of the dogs?" "I think they were afraid of the ice. If my camp had been made and a fire lighted, they might have come in for warmth, but I was not their master, and perhaps they took the back trail to the spot we started from.
And thus it came about that, a minute later, the nine looked around to see the bees making off at top speed. Sorplee raised a cheer. "Hurrah!" he shouted, and the rest took it up. Neither admitted that he was vastly relieved; it had been a little nerve-shaking to know that a single thickness of leather had been all that stood, for an hour, between him and certain death.
This traveler will climb peaks, and drive over nerve-shaking roads, a steep wall on one side and a frightful precipice on the other; he will toil up hundreds of steps, and go quaking down into mines; he will look, and admire, and tremble, till sentiment is worn to threads, purse depleted, and body and mind alike a wreck.
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