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"I guess I know sunthin' about it, arter all," said Captain Boomsby, with a troubled look. "I had a lodger in the house, and he had an attic room. He had a lot of young alligators, rattlesnakes, lizards, and other critters; and I let him put 'em in that room. He screwed the boards over the winder so they couldn't git out. I cal'late this was one of his snakes."
He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him irresistibly; but not now; he wanted where his wants were articulate a far different thing.
With a little dust for capital, this country seems right good. Why, out there in the Sierras, you know as well as I do, the soil's too poor to feed lizards. Not much like the blue grass country of Kaintuck." "Well," said Keeler, "if I had made my pile, Maryland would be good enough for me. As it is, California is all right, barring those same pesky lizards."
I had as much right to kill him as he had to make me. And how was I to know that a little thing like that would kill him? I shouldn't die if he cut off my arm or leg. ECRASIA. What nonsense! MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards. THE HE-ANCIENT. Did this dead boy make these two things?
All day they rode, silent for the most part, but occasionally Mick would answer a question as to a tree, a strange track, or a feature on the horizon. No other living thing was seen hour after hour, save a solitary eagle high in the air, a few lizards darting about the clumps of porcupine grass, and ants and flies. These latter pests are the curse of the back country. The weather was hot.
Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of the cow-catcher.
I soon found it necessary not only to brush away the web, but also to destroy the spinner; for at first, having cleared the path one day, I found the next morning that the industrious insects had spread their nets again in the very same places. The lizards were equally striking by their numbers, variety, and the situations in which they were found.
Captain was also a formidable enemy to lizards, et hoc genus omne; but this morning his owner found him engaged with that venomous reptile known in the colony by the name of deaf-adder, and although compelled instantly to let it go, it was too late, for poor Captain stretched out his legs and expired on the spot, having been already bitten by the poisonous reptile.
He had no sooner disappeared into the little room, the door of which he left slightly open, when I mentally consigned the green lizards and, in fact, the whole lacertilian family to a place warmer than the plains of Aquazilia in summer even, and sat idly wondering how long it would be before I saw Dolores again.
Earth there was none, the stalactites and stalagmitic formations were of the cleanest stone, pale drab, cream, or ruddy from the solution of iron; and at last, when they must have been walking, climbing, forcing their way through narrow cracks, or crawling like lizards, for hours, the boy stooped by a little pool of crystal water in the floor, and said: "Don't you think a bit o' bread and cheese would be nice, Master Mark?"
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