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After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch." Such panting and blowing!
The black air of the night was whitened by the storms of foam-flakes which flew over the vessel. The roaring of the broken waters increased the horrors of the scene. I firmly believed my time was come. God had been merciful, but I was to die now. As to making any shift to keep myself alive after the ship should be broken up, the thought never entered my head. What could I do? There was no boat.
When I reached the breakwater, and looked along its ridge through the darkness of the night, I was bewildered to see a whiteness lying here and there in a great patch upon its top. They were but accumulations of these foam-flakes, like soap-suds, lying so thick that I expected to have to wade through them, only they vanished at the touch of my feet.
For all this, staying their pursuit as effectively as if a sea of fire separated them from the foe, so despised and detested. The lightning still flashes, the thunder rolls, the wind bellows, and the rain pours down. No use staying any longer by the side of the swollen stream, to be tantalised by its rapid, rushing current, and mocked by its foam-flakes dancing merrily along.
"I dare say she would not miss me for the next mile!" soliloquized the idle lounger, snatching foam-flakes from their nestling-places behind the rocks, and watching them as they danced down the stream. Something, whiter and more regular in shape than they, lay upon the margin of the brook, partly concealed by a clump of sedge. A letter, with the address uppermost! Rosa's optics were keen.
Stir the fire, Annie, with yonder broken fragment of a flag-staff; its truck is still remaining, though the flag is gone, and every nation might claim it. As you stir, the burning brands evince a remembrance of their sea-lost life, the sparks drift away like foam-flakes, the flames wave and flap like sails, and the wail of the chimney sings a second shipwreck.
"That bilious flood must carry fevers with it; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its metallic hues, its scrap of rainbow-colour stranded in the mud." Durtal now thought over all these details; as he closed his eyes he could see the Drac and La Salette.
The blue reflections of big arc-lamps quivered between the foam-flakes on the river, a line of bright spots, stretching back along the bank, marked new avenues of wooden houses, and, across the bridge, the tops of tall buildings cut against the glow that shimmered about the town. At one end rose the great block of the Hulton factory, which lost something of its utilitarian ugliness at night.
Piles of lumber were bleaching in the sunshine, but the machinery was at rest, the workmen were all absent, and not a sound broke the stillness, save the steady, monotonous chant of the water leaping down into the race, where a thousand foam-flakes danced along towards the huge wheels, and died on the soft green mosses and lush-creepers that stole down to bathe in the sparkling wavelets.
After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch." Such panting and blowing!
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