Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
Our horses had been left behind, and being thus dismounted, we took passage in a four-horse hack, a square wagon on springs, enclosed with rubber-cloth curtains. Night fell soon after we began our journey, and as we were pushing on in the dark, the driver blundered and upset us off the end of a little sluiceway bridge into a mud-hole.
Jack and Nat told as much as possible of their trip from the time they started until they escaped by the sluiceway, and Mr. Ranger told how he had been watching in vain all night at the end of the trail for the return of old Mr. Lantry. He had done so for the last few nights, he said, as he was afraid to go far away in the daytime.
It seemed practical enough, if he could only elude the vigilance of the men. But there was the hard part. He got up softly about midnight to see if he could sneak from the cave. No one was in sight. He called Nat and both crawled out into the open. "Now we're free!" whispered Jack. "Come on, Nat." "Where?" "Down the sluiceway. I know where there are two big planks."
"Of course, I will go just as soon as you are rested a little, but you mustn't worry about me, Miss Ruth, I am as wet as a rat, I know, but I am that way half the time when it rains. These tarpaulins let in a lot of water " here he lifted his arms so she could see the openings herself "and then I got in over my boots trying to plug the holes in the sluiceway with some plank."
An old hermit showed Sid the place, but it's been most a year since we repaired this old sluiceway which was here before we came and begun washing, and not more than enough to pay expenses have we had out of it. I'm gettin' tired." "Maybe there's better luck ahead." "How do you mean?" "Why in the capture of these kids. Didn't you hear Sid tell?
They were much interested in the sluiceway, and went to where they could see it stretching for a long distance down the mountain side. "Quite a piece of work," observed one of the men, a short, stocky, rather jolly looking individual, who seemed out of place in a gang of ruffians.
He little dreamed that the most exciting incidents of this already eventful night were yet to come. "We had better cross to the neck of land in your boat, Hocker," suggested Zinn. "The plank over that sluiceway makes a lot of racket, and the scoundrel may hear us and slip away." This happy idea was carried out. The entire party embarked, and landed a moment later about ten yards below the mill.
They had entered the sluiceway at a place where there was scarcely any current. Then they moved forward, crouching to avoid the cross pieces. "Here we go!" whispered Jack, throwing himself on the plank, an example which Nat followed. The next instant the two boys were being whirled down the sluiceway on top of the water at a swift pace.
Immediately he turned his force of twenty-five Italians to opening an extra waste sluiceway in addition to the one that had always answered before. The five members of the club on hand all worked like horses, but their efforts were in vain, and at three o'clock the supporting wall gave way with a sound that seemed like distant thunder and the work was done. The Governor's Appeal.
"It runs for five miles," he went on, "all the way down to a big gulch they say, though I've never been to the end of it. It was built a long while ago, but we changed it a bit, and only use the upper end. We get our water from a little lake on the top of the mountain, and only the overflow goes down the sluiceway.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking