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The lightning-flash which had fallen on the brassplated cupola, and then discharged its force along a flagstaff, had alarmed even the sages and philosophers; and the Symposium had come to an abrupt end but little more dignified than the orgy in the temple-halls.
Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.
The lightning-flash is not quicker than the spring with which the Cape-tiger traversed the twenty feet between himself and his prey. The result was very effectual as regarded the cony, but it was not much to gurr about in the way of breakfast. It was a mere whet to the appetite, which increased the desire for more.
Looking back, I can see very distinctly the dark mass of the castle and the church by its side high above me against the sky, and every minute or so the lightning-flash from a storm far away in the west brightens the sombre masonry and the rock beneath. Centuries ago in this light, the rock, the fortress, and its church must have looked much the same as now.
His mind, now clear, despite the maddening torments of the past week, grasped the situation in a kind of supersensitive clairvoyance. As by a lightning-flash on a dark night, so now the blackness of his wonder, of this mystery, all stood instantly illumined. He understood. "What incredible fiendishness!" he exclaimed, quite slowly, as though unable to imagine it in human bounds.
It was so slow in coming, and so gloomy and dark when it did come, that the glare of the lightning-flash seemed more cheerful. It may be easily believed that there was no conversation during those hours of elemental strife, though the thoughts of each were busy enough. At last the thunder ceased, or, rather, retired as if in growling defiance of the world which it had failed to destroy.
But it was the injured Buncle who replied like a lightning-flash. "Never you fear, Sandy, boy!" he proclaimed to his perturbed ally. "That bullet has no' gotten your length yet. Maybe it never wull. There's mony a thing in this worrld with one man's name on it that finds its way intil the inside of some other man." He fixed Tosh with a relentless eye. "A bit ham, for instance!"
And so, after he had brought him to the place where he kept it, and had described to him with what pains he had executed the lightning-flash, which, coming down from Heaven, shivers the wheels and kills those who are turning them, and also a sun, which, bursting from a cloud, delivers S. Catharine from death, he frankly besought Michelagnolo, who could not keep from laughing as he heard poor Bugiardini's lamentations, that he should tell him how to make eight or ten principal figures of soldiers in the foreground of this altar-piece, drawn up in line after the manner of a guard, and in the act of flight, some being prostrate, some wounded, and others dead; for, said Giuliano, he did not know for himself how to foreshorten them in such a manner that there might be room for them all in so narrow a space, in the fashion that he had imagined, in line.
But swift as lightning-flash, Beltane's long quarter-staff whirled and fell, and, for all his hood of mail, Black Roger threw wide his arms and, staggering, fell upon his face and so lay; then, fierce and grim, he had leapt upon the other two, and the air was full of the rattle and thud of vicious blows.
And then, swift as a lightning-flash, striking dismay to her soul, came the consciousness of Burke gazing straight at her with that in his eyes which she could not dare not meet. She gripped his arm a little tighter. She was quivering from head to foot. "We could do it between us," she breathed again. "Wouldn't it be worth it? Oh, wouldn't it be worth it?" But Burke spoke no word.
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