United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Williams and herself through a door behind the coroner's seat to a taxicab that whirled them off to the hotel, was a wild sprawling of the Sheriff coming down in mid-air. Bat Brydges and the downy-lipped youth, chalky white as a dead birch tree, were letting themselves hastily out through a back window. Matthews was being carried down the aisle on the shoulders of a howling rabble of men and boys.
Down the line he limped, while gray-haired graduates and downy-lipped undergrads cheered him loyally, calling his name over and over, and so back to a seat in the middle of the stand, from where all through the battle his crimson-bedecked cane waved unceasingly. He was not the only one welcomed by the throng.
They met a downy-lipped youth in gray flannels and Mr. Bat Brydges wearing a panama hat and an "Oh-I-know-it-all" air. Both dabbed at their hats to the old man; but Matthews saw them not till they had passed when he stopped and turned with a look over his shoulder and a grunt.
The attorney for the Smelter City Coking Company jumped to his feet. "The witness should keep to a strict recital of fact, not rumors," he interjected; and the downy-lipped representative of the Federal Government said nothing about the privileges of a witness, or the impropriety of a special pleader opening his mouth at an inquest. "Confine yourself to facts," ordered the coroner heavily.
He was rewarded by seeing Maggie let her work fall, and gradually get so absorbed in his wonderful geological story that she sat looking at him, leaning forward with crossed arms, and with an entire absence of self-consciousness, as if he had been the snuffiest of old professors, and she a downy-lipped alumna.
If the mines were worthless, or worth only the five, ten, and three-hundred dollars that the Ring had paid the "dummy" homesteaders for each quarter section, these shifts of a hundred men at a time, and trucks and tramways would have offered a puzzle to any one but the downy-lipped youth, who had come to examine them.
In fact, there were many things about that inquest which Eleanor could not fathom. Why, for instance was the local district attorney not present? Why had the Smelter Coking Company a special pleader present? Why was the great Federal Government not represented by an attorney of equal ability, instead of this downy-lipped silent and incredibly ignorant youth?
Passing the Cabin, they again encountered a downy-lipped youth in gray flannels accompanied by a fat gentleman with tortoise-shell eyes and a tallow smile; but the jaunty dimples of the fat man, the supercilious lift of the gray flannel's eyebrow froze mid-way at sight of Meestress Leezie O'Finnigan, who bowed to Bat with the gravity of a mother superior.
The Sheriff smiled a sickly smile and ''lowed it waz. Wayland took the record of the mine's output per day. The difference must be used for shipment or storage. Wayland did the counting and measuring. MacDonald jotted down the notes. The downy-lipped youth proceeded along the tunnel with an air of supreme contempt.
Bat Brydges had been after a feature story, he had it then and there; the tenebrous thick coal darkness; the drip-drip-drip of the water-soak through the rock walls; Matthews' eyes blazing like coals of fire in the dark, his lantern shining full on Brydges; the news editor hatchet-faced, white of skin, with pistol point eyes, his lantern full on Brydges; the downy-lipped youth white, terrified, chattering of jaws, unable to speak a word, clutching to the edge of the bucket to hide his trembling, his hat had fallen off, his lantern had fallen out of his hand, and a great blob of black coal drip trickled from his yellow hair down his cheek in front of his ear; and the handy man still standing in the barrel, his face chalky and soggy like dough, with a show of bluff, but unable to look a man in the face, gazing at his feet in the bottom of the barrel: "Gawd, Wayland!
Word Of The Day