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The explosion which had demolished the work of weary weeks had shaken the ground under his flying feet so that the loose soil no longer held him. He had cried out aloud, had fought and clawed, had even bit with blackened teeth into the steep bank. And it mocked him and slipped away from him and hurled him, bruised and cut, to the bottom of the cañon.
"What I've made I'll keep," was the guttural answer, and the talon-like fingers clawed the table. "You've made people pay high for curing them, saving them sometimes; but you haven't paid me high for saving you in the courts; and there's one case that you haven't paid me for at all. That was when the patient died and you didn't."
He rolled on his side, and clawed for it, almost sightless, with one hand, and laughed harshly as he raised himself a trifle. There was a flash and a concussion, the trigger-guard sank into his nerveless finger, and a smashing amidst the undergrowth was followed by footsteps that were presently lost in the roar of the river.
At the first crack of its opening Queex turned with one of those bursts of astounding speed and clawed for admittance, its protest against the men forgotten. And it squeezed through a space Dane would have thought too narrow to accommodate its bloated body. Both men slipped around the door behind it and closed the panel tight. The air was not as fresh as it had been when the plants were there.
"And then about sunup next morning this agent is woke up by a pounding on his door. He goes down and here's Pete clawed to a frazzle and whimpering for the law's protection because his squaw has chased him over the reservation all night trying to kill him. She'd near done it, too. They say old Pete was so scared the agent had to soothe him like a mother."
It found him on his knees not in prayer, nor in thanksgiving, but eagerly feeling over the grey pile of rubbish and digging into it with clawed fingers. An hour later, with so much of daylight about him as the window permitted, he was still on his knees. Already he had collected more than a hundred golden coins, putting them together in piles of twenty.
He was swarming up, quiet as a thief, when his fingers clawed the bare plaster. The ladder hung from the square end of a protruding beam, above which there were no more rungs. He hung in doubt. Then, to his great relief, something blacker than the starlight gathered into form over his head, a slanting bulk, which gradually took on a familiar meaning.
He stood on one toe and clawed chunks out of the air while he delivered it. "He seemed to have it in for me in particular. 'You villain! You rascal! You red-headed rascal! You did this! I know you did! "'Oh, uncle! says I, 'forgive me! With that I hugged him right up to me, and he filled my bosom full of smothered language.
"Is it money you have got there?" she asked. "Let me see how much. Come." "It is just a few bank-notes I put in here to be handy," he said. "Ah; that is very handy, certainly. I never saw that custom before. Let me look." Then she took his hand, and with her own hooked finger clawed out the notes. "Ah! five, ten, fifteen, twenty pounds.
His caulks bit far up the side of the log and the force of his impact started it rolling; yet even as he clawed his way to the top of the log and got it under control the iron head of his long pike pole drove into the boom-stick and fended The Laird out of harm's way; before the log the man rode could slip by, the iron had been released and the link of chain between the two boom-sticks had been snagged with the pike hook, and both men drifted side by side.
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