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For the moment all the fight had gone out of her. He stood eyeing her, pulling at his bony finger-joints, and seemed on the point of putting some further question, but turned abruptly and left the room. As the door closed thank Heaven, at least, he did not bolt this one also! a dry sob escaped the child. Why had she told that string of falsehoods?
Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and customary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims. For the particular incident see M'Ferrin's "History of Methodism in Tennessee," p. 145. As was done to the father of Simon Girty.
The man addressed, a grey-bearded Mussulman, replied: "Shiva-ji is bad today. I fear him greatly." "Is it the madness of the dhantwallah?" "It is the madness." And the speaker cracked his finger-joints to avert evil luck. Dinner was not a very jovial meal among the English guests that night. Much to their relief the Rajah did not come in to them.
Of course many strange occurrences are incidental to such occasions; and so the lady whose beauty had been made famous must have thought when unknown crowds flocked to see her, destroying daily a vase or a statuette, a photograph or a book, but always staring with all their eyes, and one day crowning their enormities with a procession of deaf-mutes from an asylum, which filed in and gazed and filed out again, in total silence of course, save now and then a crack of nimble finger-joints.
They singed off his skin by shreds, they wrenched out his teeth and finger-joints, they dragged him about at the end of a rope hitched to a team of stout horses, they sprinkled him from head to foot with acids and seething oil, but Damiens never uttered a sound till his dying groan announced the conclusion of the tragedy."
Thereupon Michael knelt, clasped his hands so close that the bent finger-joints grew white, raised his massive head upward and prayed with his eyes closed. The intercession for life ended, he rose up, shook Vallack by the hand, and so departed. "Allus, when you've got the chance, bear the balm o' Gilead to a sinner's couch," he said to his daughter as they walked home.
It was an old hand, delicately white, with large finger-joints. "I can't pretend to make a jest of what I'm going to say," she said, with a look at Coryston. "I wanted to speak to you all on a matter of business not very agreeable business, but necessary. I am sure you will hear me out, and believe that I am doing my best, according to my lights, by the family the estates and the country."
He measured the length of the bay with the middle joint of his forefinger. "Three four and a bit over," he counted. "Anchorage in that round cove to the northwest." Then, measuring again, "And the cross is two finger-joints northwest of the anchorage. What those lines each side of it are I don't know, but I'll remember them.
He stood only this high, Sahib, from the bottom of this truck, but he knew all our troopers by name every one.... And he went to England, and he became a young man, and back he came, lilting a little in his walk, and cracking his finger-joints back to his own regiment and to me. He had not forgotten either our speech or our customs. He was a Sikh at heart, Sahib.
Young of a reddish face with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints. So did his father before him, who was Deputy-Commissioner of Jullundur in my father's time when I rode with the Gurgaon Rissala. My father? Jwala Singh. A Sikh of Sikhs he fought against the English at Sobraon and carried the mark to his death.
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