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The various hats, in fact, were quite a Shakespearean study. Divers negroes, in very free-and-easy pantaloons, and with no redundancy in the shirt line, were scuttling about, hither and thither, without bringing to pass any very particular results, except expressing a generic willingness to turn over everything in creation generally for the benefit of Mas'r and his guests.
They thought they heard approaching footsteps. A moment passed but no one came into the room. "Hurry," urged Glora. "That was nothing. We're waiting too long." "My boy Alan, after all these years " As they were about to take the diminishing drug a very queer sound came from across the room. A scuttling, scratching, and the drone of wings. "God, Father look!"
That terrible, half hour facing death the sudden revulsion at their wonderful deliverance completely prostrated them, and they felt exhausted and weak, as if after some great exertion. On the previous occasions in which they had seen great danger together at the mill of Dettingheim, the fight on the Dykes, the scuttling of the boat they had been actively engaged.
It was horrible to have dust and splinters blown into that snug, homely room, whereas if I had been in a ruined barn I wouldn't have given the thing two thoughts. In the same way bombs dropping in central London seemed a grotesque indecency. I hated to see plump citizens with wild eyes, and nursemaids with scared children, and miserable women scuttling like rabbits in a warren.
He picked out and threw over three or four large starfish, or "five-fingers." The hake head stuck on the bait-spear in the center was almost gone; Jim replaced it with a fresh head from the bait-tub. Then he seized a mottled, purplish crab that had been aimlessly scuttling to and fro across the bottom of the pot, and impaled him, back down, on the barb of the spear.
"No, I don't think it can pay, my lad, even at its best. It's jolly enough for awhile, maybe, for those whose hearts are so hard that they think nothing of scuttling a ship with all on board, or of making the crew and passengers walk the plank in cold blood. Still even they must know that it can't last, and that there's a gallows somewhere waiting for them.
The first thing that revived his sluggish memory was the scuttling away, in anxious haste, of a scorpion that had sought and found comfortable quarters during the night under the lee of his right leg. Starting up, he crushed the reptile with his foot. "You will get used to that," said a quietly sarcastic voice with a slightly foreign accent, close to him.
It was a breezy, sunny autumn day, and all the world about him was astir with life; gawky yellow-legged fowls pecked and scratched round his feet with prodigious activity, calves were bleating in the adjacent pens, while the very pigs were scuttling about their styes, squealing the while as though it were supper-time.
Whatever merits this final refuge might have as a stronghold, it was beyond question a noisome place. The beating on the stable-door was working up to a crescendo. Presently there came a crash that shook the floor on which we sat and sent our neighbours, the rats, scuttling to and fro in a perfect frenzy of perturbation.
"Ay, ay," said Jack; "he quite forgets when the bullets were scuttling our nobs off Cape Ushant, when that big Frenchman had hold of him by the skirf of his neck, and began pummelling his head, and the lee scuppers were running with blood, and a bit of Joe Wiggins's brains had come slap in my eye, while some of Jack Marling's guts was hanging round my neck like a nosegay, all in consequence of grape-shot then he didn't say as I was a swab, when I came up, and bored a hole in the Frenchman's back with a pike.
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