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There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted: "Turn out, boys the tarantulas is loose!" No warning ever sounded so dreadful.
And, but for these attacks, long ago they would have been forgotten. In the amber of his genius Voltaire preserved these insects, these tarantulas, these scorpions. It is fashionable to say that he was not profound. This is because he was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity he laughed, and was called irreverent. He thought God would not damn even a priest forever.
I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that episode over again. Nobody was hurt.
In and out among these plants and bushes ran nimble lizards of at least half a dozen different kinds: lizards that carried their tails curled up over their backs like pug-dogs; lizards that amused themselves by pushing out a whitish, crescent-shaped protuberance from under their throats and then drawing it in again; lizards that changed color while I watched them; and big gray iguanas, two or three feet in length, which, although perfectly harmless, looked ugly and malevolent enough to be classed with Cuban land-crabs and tarantulas.
That path was no road for a hard-drinking man to travel and, now and then, Grafton shrank back, with a startled laugh, from the hideous things crawling across the road and rustling into the cactus spiders with snail-houses over them; lizards with green bodies and yellow legs, and green legs and yellow bodies; hairy tarantulas, scorpions, and hideous mottled land-crabs, standing three inches from the sand, and watching him with hideous little eyes as they shuffled sidewise into the bushes.
The man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken only a crack in a box had caught his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it.
"You ain't got sense enough to know the difference between a hair rope and a can of California apricots." "Put 'em in a box?" cried Curly. "Why? Them was ornyments! Now you ain't got a ornyment on your whole place, except a horned toad and four tarantulas in a teacup. Now a real ornyment is somethin' you put on the parlor table, man, and show it free and open. It's sort of sacred like."
"Mr. Beetle Man," she said, in a tremulous voice, "the rock is moving." "I don't feel it. Though it might be a touch of earthquake. We have 'em often." "Not your rock. The tarantula rock, I mean." "Nonsense! A hundred tarantulas couldn't stir it." "Well, it seems to be moving, and that's just as bad. I'm tired and I'm lonely.
"You have been indulged quite sufficiently, Louis. Do you know, if you often spoke to me in this manner I should soon hate you?" "That would indeed be unfortunate. Never hate, Ruth; besides making enemies, hate is an arch enemy to the face, distorting the softest and loveliest." "We cannot love people who calmly sit and irritate us like mocking tarantulas." "That is exaggerated, I think.
It was "recreation" with a vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas. "Romantic adventure" could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.
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