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Updated: June 21, 2025
He had installed an automatic doffing apparatus, and made a departure from the usual dry spinning in a demi-sec, or half-dry, spinning frame, which was new at that time, and had offered excellent results and spun a beautifully smooth yarn.
A low roof extending over the doorway gave semblance to a porch which some scorched vines had vainly tried to decorate. There was a rude seat made of a goods box beside the doorway. Behind the house rose the low crest of a prairie billow, hardly discernible on the level plains. Before it lay the endless prairie across which ran the now half-dry, grass-choked stream.
Sometimes ninety per cent. of the water of a stream is taken away to drive a milldam or do work, and only ten per cent. can be spared to trickle down the half-dry channel and do nothing but reflect the bright sun and help the little flowers and the grass to grow.
"A crocodile!" said Mark as he gazed excitedly into the clear water at the plainly defined shape of the little saurian, for it was not above four feet long. "Wait a minute," whispered Billy; "I'll give him such a wonner in the skull," and picking up a heavy piece of stone from the many lying in the half-dry river-bed he pitched it with fairly good aim just above the basking reptile.
After our passports had been examined we rode through the gloomy chasm-like gate, turned sharply to the left, and found ourselves standing on the edge of a half-dry river bed. Below us stretched line after line of double-humped camels, some crowded in yellow-brown masses which seemed all heads and curving necks, and some kneeling quietly on the sand.
'Well I am damned! exclaimed Dick, and returned to the chambers. Torpenhow and the Nilghai found him sitting on the steps to the studio door, repeating the phrase with an awful gravity. 'You'll be more damned when I'm done with you, said the Nilghai, upheaving his bulk from behind Torpenhow's shoulder and waving a sheaf of half-dry manuscript.
For an hour or two they climbed up the half-dry bed of a mountain torrent, and more than once they were ankle-deep in swampy ground. The Moritos passed through the jungle with the agility and noiselessness of cats, but the three white men floundered along as best they could. Their captors uttered never a word and would not allow them to speak.
Here and there were long, deep pools in the bed of the river, where rushes and lilies grew and huge mailed garfish swam slowly just beneath the surface of the water. Once my two companions stopped to pull a mired cow out of a slough, hauling with ropes from their saddle horns. In places there were half-dry pools, out of the regular current of the river, the water green and fetid.
Below me wound the dusty pike, like a yellow ribbon, flanked on one side by the half-dry creek, and on the other by a field of tasselled corn. A crow sat upon the dead limb of a sycamore, and cawed, and cawed, in noisy unrest. The weight which had been placed upon my breast two months before seemed like a millstone now. The consciousness of hopelessness made it heavier than before.
For the fraction of a second, the intruder crouched there; peering about, to determine into what company his jump had landed him. He was a gray monkey, small, infinitely aged and withered of aspect. His paws and forearms were black with half-dry ink. Here and there, all over his fuzzy gray body, ink-blobs were spattered.
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