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Then began the ripping whine of saws and the wrenching clutch of cant hooks; loads of clean planks now came clattering up the rough road from the sawmill in the valley below men cursed over wheels sunk over their hubs in mud over broken axles and shifted loads. The clearing had now become Holcomb's home if a square box provided with a door and a factory-made window can be called a home.
But I could have keelhauled the wretch, bell and all, when he came to the door of the little hotel where my prospective audience and I were dining, and with his clattering bell and fiendish yell made noises that would awake the dead, all over the voyage of the Spray from "Boston to Bowen, the two Hubs in the cart-wheels of creation," as the "Boomerang" afterward said. Mr.
Fifty yards away was another ambulance with its wheels buried to the hubs in the loose sand. Red Cross nurses and men wearing the emblem on their arms and caps were passing here and there, assisting the injured with "first aid," temporarily bandaging heads, arms and legs or carrying to the rear upon a stretcher a more seriously injured man.
She held her head high, gave to him as to Arnold a nod of careless recognition, and continued talking: "Such a road so steep sand half-way to the hubs, such water-bars!" She turned to Morrison with her first overt recognition of the new status between them. "You ought to have seen your fiancée! She was wonderful! I was proud of her!" Morrison nodded a thoughtful assent.
These wheels, now; machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubular steel spokes, drop-forged and machined axles. The Svants wouldn't be able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred, if somebody showed them where and how to mine iron and how to smelt and work it. And how to build a steam engine. He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles.
The coach itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which seems inseparable from spectacularity.
Waterproofs, blankets, umbrellas, all were soaked, as hour after hour we were dragged slowly through the muskeg, or marsh, following no apparent track, and with the water often up to the "hubs" of the wheels.
On went the first speed, most powerful of all, but not powerful enough to fight through snow nearly up to the hubs. The Aigle was prisoned like a rat in a trap, and could neither go back nor forward. "Well?" I questioned, half laughing, half frightened, at this fulfilment of the morning's prophecy. "Sit still, and I'll try to push her through," said Jack jumping out into the deep snow.
He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it.
My battery is toilin' along, sand to the hubs of gun-carriages an' caissons, when I sees the mules p'int their y'ears for'ard with looks of happy surprise. Then the intelligent anamiles begins a song of praise; an' next while we-all is marvellin' thereat an' before ever a gent can stretch hand to bridle to stop 'em, the mules begins to fly.
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