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"I'm fu'st hoseman, and it's lucky you came along and giv' me a lift." He set his gun-butt down between his knees, the muzzle pointing up. Cap'n Sproul had his teeth set hard upon a hank of his grizzled whiskers, and his eyes on the smoke ahead. Todd ran his wheezing horse up the ridge, and when they topped it they beheld the whole moving scene below them.
And that instant when she was locked in Cleve's arms, when the silence was so beautiful and full, she heard the heavy pound of a gun-butt upon the table in Kells's room. "Where is Cleve?" That was the voice of Kells, stern, demanding. Joan felt a start, a tremor run over Jim. Then he stiffened. "I can't locate him," replied Red Pearce. "It was the same last night an' the one before.
Long before the fatigue-party sent to collect brushwood had returned, the men were settled down by their valises, kettles and pots had appeared from the surrounding country and were dangling over fires as the kid and the compressed vegetable bubbled together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess-tins; outrageous demands for "a little more stuffin' with that there liver-wing;" and gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as a gun-butt.
"His fall and a rap over the head with a gun-butt have made him pretty sick. I am sending out a posse of men from this end to try and get the stick-up man. You'd better do the same up there." For a moment Judith sat staring at the telephone dully. Robbed of a thousand dollars, and in broad daylight! A thing like this had not occurred on the Blue Lake for a dozen years.
Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through. "In spite of my wound," said he, "they made me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make me march. There were seventeen or eighteen persons with me.
Thurston rarely forgot either an injury or a friend, and, the preceding October, when tripping, he fell helpless, Black Jim twice, with murderous intent, had brought a gun-butt down upon his unprotected skull.
To the rear Speed saw three other men an Indian, tall, swart, and saturnine, who walked with a limp; a picturesque Mexican with a spangled hat and silver spurs, evidently the captor of Lawrence Glass on the evening previous; and an undersized little man with thick-rimmed spectacles and a heavy-hanging holster from which peeped a gun-butt. All were smiling pleasantly, and seemed a bit abashed.
They had followed Grace and Hippy and were eagerly peering over the heads of the two kneeling Overlanders. "Footprints of a pair of heavy boots," announced Hippy. "The impression they have left in the moss is unmistakable. This looks as if he had rested his gun-butt here," he added, laying a finger on another depression in the moss. "I do not think so," said Grace, after examining it critically.
He picked a man here, and another there, and these went silently to a grim duty behind the regiment. "If any try to go back, shoot them down!" he cried. Then with a gun-butt he shattered the ice and was the first to leap into the water under it. They followed, some with a cheer that was most pitiful of all.
While we were spying through the woods, watching the English build their fort, I thought that I saw a figure flitting through the bush to the rear. I dared not fire. One shot would have betrayed us to the English. But I pointed my gun. The thing came gliding noiselessly nearer. I clicked the gun-butt without firing. The thing paused.
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