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They vanished in a breath, and the dead carcass, relieved of their weight, seemed to spring, as though it were alive, some ten or twelve feet out of the seething and simmering surface which had been frothed up by the descent of the vessels; the next moment it turned over and gave us a view of its whole length a sixty to seventy-foot whale, if the carcass was an inch, with here and there the black scythe-like dorsal fin of a shark sailing round it.
Half an hour later the proa's cargo of sago and trepang, as well as a doubtful-minded compass, was in the Haliotis. The two huge triangular mat sails, with their seventy-foot yards and booms, had followed the cargo, and were being fitted to the stripped masts of the steamer. They rose, they swelled, they filled, and the empty steamer visibly laid over as the wind took them.
So Hans Nelson worked at his trade that winter and helped rear the mushroom outfitting-town of Skaguay. He was on the edge of things, and throughout the winter he heard all Alaska calling to him. Latuya Bay called loudest, so that the summer of 1898 found him and his wife threading the mazes of the broken coast-line in seventy-foot Siwash canoes. With them were Indians, also three other men.
And in this shattered, box-like structure, dazed by the sweeping fall through an arc of seventy-foot radius, crouched Rowland, bleeding from a cut in his head, and still holding to his breast the little girl now too frightened to cry. By an effort of will, he aroused himself and looked.
Dayton and Ludlow, other Kentucky suburbs, were also sufferers from the rising flood and many houses were already completely under water. A seventy-foot stage for Cincinnati was predicted. The Central Union Station was abandoned and all trains leaving or entering the city were detoured. Slowly the treacherous waters rose while tired watchers waited anxiously.
It caught him, in that margin of an inch, and hurled him backward and side-twisting. Twice he whirled sidewise, and two and a half times he turned over, ere he struck on his head and neck on the rocks. He never moved after he struck. The seventy-foot fall broke his neck and crushed his skull.
If you will watch a warbler collecting the insects out of the top of a seventy-foot forest oak, busy as a bee hour after hour, it will convince you that the birds do for the forests that which man with all his resources cannot accomplish. You will then realize that to this country every woodpecker, chickadee, titmouse, creeper and warbler is easily worth its weight in gold.
With his sharp little teeth he cut down his big timber willow sprouts never more than an inch in diameter; and when one of these four or five-foot sprouts toppled down, he undoubtedly felt as great a satisfaction as Beaver Tooth felt when he sent a seventy-foot birch crashing into the edge of the pond. Baree could not understand the fun of all this.
Al Devis had been with us when we crashed the door out of the meeting room, but he'd fallen by the way. We had a couple of flashlights, so, after sending the car down to Bottom Level, we picked our way up the zigzag iron stairs to the catwalk, under the seventy-foot ceiling, and sat down in the dark. Joe Kivelson was fretting about what would happen to the rest of his men.
A pair of seventy-foot canoes, loaded with outfits, gold-rushers, and Indians, and under full sail, drove down from the counter direction. One of them veered sharply towards the landing stage, but the other pinched the Whitehall against the barge. The boatman had unshipped his oars in time, but his small craft groaned under the pressure and threatened to collapse.
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