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He describes the wagon-battery, and its inefficiency in dislodging them from their depressed but safe situation. His retreat to the sink-hole under the circumstances, was a sound military movement. Lieutenant Drakeford having withdrawn his forces, Black Hawk and his party left their intrenchment and returned by land, to their village.
For a few moments he clung there, the nervous thoughts of what might be if he slipped and were caught in the whirlpool being sufficient to half paralyse him; then turning angry at his feeling of cowardice, he reached boldly out again, found fresh hand-hold, and did the same again and again, till he was a dozen yards beyond the sink-hole, and had to stop and think.
"Whatever is the matter, Yerkes? What is a sink-hole?" Yerkes looked round. "A sink-hole, my lady?" he said slowly "A sink-hole, well, it's as you may say a muskeg." "A what?" "A place where you can't find no bottom, my lady. This one's a vixen, she is! What she's cost the C.P.R.!" he threw up his hands. "And there's no contenting her the more you give her the more she wants.
In silence we followed Auguste through the depths of the woods, turning here and there to avoid a fallen tree or a sink-hole where the water still remained. At length we came out in the glare of the sun and crossed the dusty road to the levee bank. Some forty yards below us was the canoe, and we walked to it, still in silence. Auguste flung in his bundle, and turned to us.
"Oh! come and see," said Harry; and away the whole party went, to be just in time to see the water taking its departure, and Dick's kennel wrecked, down by the gates where the yard was highest, for Old Sam, in spite of the pelting rain, was punching away at the sink-hole with the stump of an old birch broom, and the water was rushing down it like a little maelstrom; while the bits of straw and twigs that floated near, represented the unfortunate vessels that get caught in that famous whirlpool.
"A lot of us have staked our all on the outcome here in Ascalon, we fellows who were here before the town turned out to be the sink-hole of perdition that it is today. We built our homes here, and brought our families out, and we can't afford to abandon it to these crooks and gamblers and gun-slingers from the four corners of the earth.
Keith's eyes turned on him quietly. " what I was misled into putting into your sink-hole down there. You may remember that you told me, when I went in, that you would guarantee me all I put in." His voice rose into a sneer. "Oh, no. None of that, none of that!" interrupted Norman, quickly. "You may remember, Mr. Kestrel, ?" But Keith interrupted him with a wave of his hand. "I do remember.
The rainfall had been sufficient to aggregate considerable water in the gullies about the sink-hole, and these, emptying into the cavity and sending a continuous stream over the boy, had served to chill him through and through, and he had a pretty fair chance of being drowned, or dying from cold and exhaustion.
Jerry wanted to buy that swamp meadow next his place on Long Island and had been dickering with the old fellow who owns it all winter, telling him it would be a good place to raise cranberries if it was dug out and drained, and they had almost agreed on the price about twice what it was worth when down goes Muggles to spend the night and Jerry blabs it all out, and just why he wanted it, and the next morning Muggles, to clinch the deal and help Jerry, slips over to the hayseed and tells him how the Sunnybrook Club are going to buy Jerry's place, and how they wanted the swamp for a hatchery all true and that the hayseed oughtn't to wait a moment, but send word by HIM that the deal was closed, because the club-house being near by would make all the rest of his land twice as valuable; and the old Skeezicks winked his eye and shifted his tobacco and said he'd think about it, and now you can't buy that sink-hole for twenty times what it's worth, and the Sunnybrook is looking for another site nearer Woodvale.
It meant something for a man of Hollis's years and training to bury himself in this desolate sink-hole of iniquity; to elect to carry on an unequal war with interests that controlled the law machinery of the county and Territory whose power extended to Washington. No doubt the young man was even now brooding over the future, planning his fight, pessimistically considering his chances of success.
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