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For it gave me a little comfortable shock of surprise when I saw my coolies at dinner sitting on benches around the table, "just like folks," instead of squatting on the ground after the fashion of my Indian servants.
But how came you here?" For reply, the man put his finger to his lips and glanced towards the door; then, as if expecting a spy, stepped over to the window and looked out. Satisfied with his inspection, he came back, and, squatting himself down on the floor, looked for a moment at his prisoner. "I come because I cannot stay," he replied in fairly good French.
The cattle were on two great boundaries of a thousand acres, sleeping in the deep blue grass on the flat hill-tops. Jud and two of Marsh's drivers took one line of the ridges, and Marsh and I took the other. The night was lifting when we came out on the line of level hill-tops, and through the haze the sleeping cattle were a flock of squatting shadows.
Though, after all, one would like to emerge again, to tell the tale to the children; and the whole dubiety of it is in that last difficulty. It is almost certain the magic would be too powerful. About the bright yellow sea of the desert which came up to the high cliffs of the town, the squatting camels made dark hummocks.
I must say though, that at that particular moment I was not very sanguine of getting the girls away out of the power of this savage, who had doubtless won them from some of his fellows by more or less fair fighting. I made my way over to where the chief was squatting, and gazed at him long and steadily. I remember his appearance as though it were but yesterday that we met.
When Sailor perceived that Jacko had removed his gymnastics from himself, and transferred them to the block, he rose from his recumbent attitude on the deck, and, squatting on his haunches, observed, for some little time, with singular attention and silence, the extraordinary flexibility of Jacko's limbs; but at the moment when Jacko suspended his little carcase by his smaller tail from the runner-block, whether it was the manner in which Sailor expressed a roar of laughter, or whether it was a shout of applause at the comical likeness of Jacko's body, swinging in the air, to a bunch of black grapes, certain it is, that, at that instant, Sailor gave one, but one, tremendous bark, and, in the twinkling of an eye, Jacko fell souse into the water.
The distance was some hundred yards; and then I found my coolies squatting on their heels. They had kept the pole on their shoulders, and all my worldly goods, still tied to the pole, were resting on the ground between them. As far as the eye could reach along the quay there was not another soul abroad except the police peon, who saluted us.
Yellow sky and purple hill, and short streak for the steamboat and its wake, and a smear of white steam straggling behind. Sam does 'em as well as anybody. Sometimes he puts in a pile or two in the foreground for a broken dock and a rowboat with a lone fisherman squatting on the hind seat. Then he asks five dollars more. Always get more you know for figures in a landscape."
By and by the two vessels near each other. They approach within hailing distance, and are announcing each to each their identity, when the young man at the tiller jerks himself to a squatting posture, and, from under a broad-brimmed and slouched straw hat, cries to the schooner's one passenger: "Hello, Challie Keene." And the passenger more quietly answers back: "Hello, Raoul, is that you?"
We now advanced with greater caution, Bracewell and Hector, who were the most experienced in bush life, leading, I following, until we could look right down upon the hut. A few blacks were squatting on the ground outside, and the hut itself appeared to be full of them. The sergeant and his men, I should have said, had brought some coils of rope with which to bind any prisoners they might capture.
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