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I'd scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch. "You're missing the point," began Dinky-Dunk. "Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing.
He saw them pierce the rocks with hammered drills; he saw them then put in a small, round, harmless looking paper cylinder which, of course, he knew held something like gunpowder; he saw them tamp it down with infinite care, leaving only a protruding fuse; he saw them light the fuse and scamper off to a safe distance while he watched the sputtering sparks run down the fuse, pause at the tamping, then, having pierced it, disappear.
"That's just how the most o' the reckless men in the bal do get blaw'd up," he said; "they're always picking away at the holes, and tamping with iron tools; why, thee might as well put a lighted match down the muzzle of a loaded gun as tamp with an iron borer." "Come, now," said Maggot, looking up from his work with a leer, "it warn't that as made old Kimber nearly blow hisself up last week."
Then with one brief, fervent prayer, the solemnly murmured "Amen," carving no line, raising no stone, but tamping deep and heavy the earth upon their blanket-shrouded forms, without the trooper volleys, with only the faint soft winding of the trooper's last earthly trumpet-call singing "lights out" to sadly listening ears, the little group dispersed, each man going to his post.
Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "the spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby," where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage"; or as Margaret Fuller, "her large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness"?
As the filling is nearly completed, with the fore feet and jaws the surrounding earth is scraped for material, which she immediately proceeds to pack by a rhythmic tamping motion of the tail, until, at the end of five minutes, perhaps, the ground-level is finally reached, the surface smoothed, and no sign remains to mark the grave of the stupefied spider victim.
There was a blending of chagrin and amused tolerance on his face as the screen had him murmur, casting the letter aside, "Poor, Silly Little Girls!" From this early scene Merton learned Parmalee's method of withdrawing the gold cigarette case, of fastidiously selecting a cigarette, of closing the case and of absently thinking of other matters tamping the gold-tipped thing against the cover.
Sometimes the fuse is not placed properly in the detonator, or the detonator is not properly enclosed in the cartridge, or the fuse is injured by improper tamping. If several shots have been fired together, particularly at the change of a "shift," the men who have to remove the broken material may in so doing explode the missed charge.
The action of the charge will generally be found quite as effective with a few inches of covering matter as with a foot or more, while the exploding of misfire cartridges is rendered simple, as no removal of tamping is required before placing the top "plug" in case of misfire.
As we were riding back to our cars on the second afternoon, we had to cross the branch road-bed, where a gang happened to be at work tamping the ties. "Since you're interested in road agents, Miss Cullen," I said, "you may like to see one. That fellow standing in the ditch is Jack Drute, who was concerned in the D. & R. G. hold-up three years ago."
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