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Richard was struck by the old man's prodigious capacity for devouring food. He ate with a calculated energy as though the safety of nations depended upon his sustenance. Apart from the ordinary fare, he demolished about eighteen inches of a long French loaf at his side, tearing pieces from it with his short stubby fingers and filling his mouth with great wads of crust and dough.
They walked side by side toward the spiral, Rand keeping on the right and lagging behind a little, lifting the stubby revolver clear of his pocket. Yet, in spite of his vigilance, it happened before he could prevent it. A lance of yellow fire jumped out of the shadows of the stairway, and there was a soft cough of a silenced pistol, almost lost in the click-click of the breech-action.
He had come in that night when it was over weighed down with the fact that his wages had been stopped in his absence, and that it would take a long time to pay the debts incurred during his illness. There was a zigzag line struck twice across the calendar below that date. "That much goes for the doctor!" he exclaimed, fiercely checking off the time with a stubby pencil.
It was one of those moments when Hero, forgetting the bleakness of his youth, abandoned himself to the joy of living. He was tearing round and round Stubby, barking, when Stubby's father called out: "Here! shut up there, you cur. You better lie low. You're going to be shot the first of August."
Across their slender undulating bodies he struggled to the shore, battered, bruised, and tailless, but alive. He entered the first brook he came to, and there he remained a month in gloomy solitude, for he felt that his chief glory had been taken from him. In a month's time his tail had partially repaired itself. The new portion was stubby and colourless.
His close-cropped hair was an iron-gray, and his stubby beard and mustache a fierce red, the ferocity of which was tempered by the mildness of deep-set, small blue eyes.
I didn't care; if van Manderpootz hadn't been armored in stubby whiskers, I'd have kissed him. Perhaps I did anyway; I can't be sure of my actions during those chaotic minutes in the professor's tiny office. At last I calmed. "I can look her up!" I gloated. "She must have landed with the other survivors, and they were all on that British tramp freighter the Osgood, that docked here last week.
Rau, the Belgian, with his hairy arms and stubby figure, struck one somehow as being more in his element in so wild a business, and you took his calm for granted, like a soldier serving a gun and doing what he's told.
"Come on out to the house," Stubby urged. "Your men can handle the job a day or two longer. Forget the grind for once. It's getting you." "No, I don't think it is," MacRae denied. "But a man can't play and produce at the same time. I have to keep going." He did go out to Abbott's one evening, however, and suffered a good deal of teasing from Nelly over his manhandling of Sam Kaye.
There was not that about Stubby's short person to cause the hands of gentle ladies to move instinctively to his head. Stubby bristled. That is, he appeared to bristle. Inwardly, Stubby yearned, though he would have swung into his very best brigand manner on the spot were you to suggest so offensive a thing.
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