Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
The cab-horse's head comes nearly inside the 'bus, the 'bus-pole threatens to poke the hansom in front; the brougham would be careful, for varnish sake, but is wedged and must take its chance; van-wheels catch omnibus hubs; hurry, scurry, whip, and drive; slip, slide, bump, rattle, jar, jostle, an endless stream clattering on, in, out, and round.
As soon as day dawned the march began. The artillery and baggage wagons moved noiselessly through the deep dust that rose to the very hubs of the wheels, and the infantry sank ankle-deep in that soft, choking, hot dust that never cooled even at night.
This much I know, for I have seen it time and again during the last four months: nothing that moves on wheels has ventured upon that roadway that it did not sink slowly but surely up to the hubs of its wheels in the unresisting sand.
To make the story short, Si's mules stumbled and floundered and kicked, while Si laid on with the whip and used some of the words he had learned from the old teamster before starting. At length the wagon became hopelessly stalled. The wheels sank to the hubs, and Si yelled and cracked his whip in vain.
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.
And then, when the ponies were surging into their collars, with the loose sand and gravel half-way to the hubs, somewhere between thirty and forty Apaches opened fire from the brush on both sides of the wagon-track. The first volley came at close range; so close that in spite of the customary poor marksmanship of their kind the Indians wounded every man in the coach.
The off-wheels of the incoming coach were tilted up on the hillside as far as they could be without an upset. In vain; our hubs still locked. We were then allowed to dismount. Our coach was backed down for fifty yards or so. Small heaps of stones were piled opposite the hubs of the stationary coach.
Here the first battery was to be planted; and from this point other guns were to be dragged onward to more advanced stations, a distance in all of more than two miles, thought by the French to be impassable. So, in fact, it seemed; for at the first attempt, the wheels of the cannon sank to the hubs in mud and moss, then the carriage, and finally the piece itself slowly disappeared.
With their quaking equipage hugging the farther side of the way the veiled ladies leaned out to see, but drew in as a six-mule wagon coming from the front at wild speed jounced and tottered by them. It had nearly passed when with just a touch of hubs it tossed them clear off the road, smashing one of their wheels for good and all.
Behoind thim wagon-tires there sames to be a natural slope of earth." "Tip the tires over, Clary," I ordered; and presently a number of tires, from which the fire had burned the felloes, spokes, and hubs, fell into the coals, disclosing a recently filled aperture. "Looks as if the end of a passage had been filled, doesn't it?" asked the surgeon. "It certainly does," I answered.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking