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It was better shooting-light now; distances were not quite so deceptive. Suddenly the man on the white horse appeared on the crest of a distant sand-hill. The outlaw, leaning his rifle across his horse's back, sighted carefully and fired; the white horse went to his knees and his rider leaped clear. Instantly the pursued man vaulted into his saddle and rode furiously away.
And even then he had no way to guess what new trouble had come to the Great Work. Shooting his spurs into his horse's panting sides, he swept down the gentle slope of the sand-hill and galloped straight toward the cook's tent. He saw that not only were the men idle, but that they gave no evidence of an intention to go to work.
They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below, under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them interested in it.
Nearly three hours are occupied by oscillations which mutually annul one another. The Mouse does not cross the little sand-hill heaped about her by the rakes of the workers. For the second time, a male appears and makes a round of exploration. A boring is effected in loose earth, close beside the brick.
But Susie stood declaiming on the sand-hill, inspired by her own eloquence, and gazed at with admiration by Amy for a courage she could not match. "O Susie, how brave you are!" she said. "They'd have to kill you to get at it; you couldn't get at your heart till you were dead. I don't believe I could ever be as brave as that. I know I should cry."
Gilbert was brought to trial, severely whipped, and they made him beg all the children to pardon him for his treatment to them. But he never was allowed to go into the woods with the rest of the children during that season. My sand-hill associates always thanked me for the course I took, which saved them and myself from further punishment by him.
'Tis clear that vanity will trip him, but honesty is a strong upholder; and he is one that hath the spirit of enterprise and the mask of dissimulation: gratitude I observe in him; and it is as I thought when I came upon him on the sand-hill outside the city, that his star is clearly in a web with our star, he destined for the Shaving of Shagpat.
A plump rotund body rose from the weeds, sixty yards away, I guessed, and I pitched up the rifle, dropping my left elbow well over my knee and steadying the cold barrel against the tree. Sixty yards and a two-foot target, what need for such precautions? one hears the marksmen say, and when stalking sand-hill cranes in warm sunlight now I can agree with them.
Captain Barker judged the breadth of the channel to be a quarter of a mile, and he expressed a desire to swim across it to the sand-hill to take bearings, and to ascertain the nature of the strand beyond it to the eastward.
They were received by a tremendous fire from the guns of the forts and the muskets of the soldiers; but, although the effect was serious, they did not hesitate a moment, but dashed forwards towards the foot of the sand-hill and the wall of the old town, halted for a moment, poured in a volley, and then rushed into the breach and against the walls.
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