United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They listened. All was silent again. A damp and musty odour pervaded the place. Under their feet the floor boards had rotted and as they made a cautious circuit of the interior they trod as often on soil as on wood. The hut was apparently empty of everything save a section of rusted stovepipe, dangling from a hole in the roof, some damp rags and paper in a corner and a broken box.
"Nettie heard you in the hall or through the stovepipe." She spoke doubtfully: "She'd like to see you, but I don't know if it would be right with her in bed. Still, I promised I'd tell you." He rose promptly. The woman stood aside at the upper door and he at once saw Nettie lying with her vigorous black hair sprawling in a thick twist across the pillow.
There was a stove in the main cabin with a stovepipe going straight up through the roof like a smoke stack and there was a damper in it right near the stove. "Get a handbook or a pocket code," somebody said, "so he'll have the signs right near him." "He doesn't need any signs," Pee-wee shouted, disgusted like.
Those repositories of small stores did not contain a string, however; but mixed up with a piece of cord, a slate pencil, an iron hinge, two marbles, a brass ring, and six inches of stovepipe chain, were two cents, which the owner thereof carefully picked out of the heap of miscellaneous articles and thrust them into the hand of Katy.
Bright squares of light showed from the windows of the bunk-house, office, and grub-shack, with its adjoining cook-shack, from the iron stovepipe of which sparks shot skyward in a continuous shower. Fallon shouldered the wolf and, accompanied by Bill, made toward the bunk-house, while the Frenchman turned the team toward the stable.
"Yes," answered John; "these rosettes on the chairs, that band, and " "Oh!" Ross exclaimed. "That?" He fingered the band on the stovepipe as if he saw it for the first time. "Yes; I see." "But what are they for?" asked Harkless, touching one of the streamers curiously. "Why it's it's likely meant for decorations."
The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of "Old Dog Tray," "Plug" Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his "emporium" in Smyrna Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.
You see, Simms is an old shipmate of mine. He don't dream I'm within a hundred miles o' here. Aye, or a thousand." He gave a deep-chested chuckle. "Now, then, matey, look here." Rainey was anchored by the compelling grip. They stood next to the slip in which the sealer lay. The Karluk's decks were deserted, though there was smoke coming from the galley stovepipe.
But he gets turned down just because he goes around looking like a slob; while a feller what can't pay his own laundry bill, Mawruss, has no trouble getting a thousand dollars because the second vice-president is buffaloed already by a stovepipe hat, a Prince Albert coat and a four-carat stone with a flaw in it."
The ancient passenger scanned him perplexedly, scanned the napless, threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday service no man knows how many years, contemplated the marvelous stovepipe hat of still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor, pathetic old stiff brim canted up "gallusly" in the wrong places, and said, with a hesitation that indicated strong internal effort to "place" the gentle old apparition, "Why... let me see... plague on it... there's something about you that... er... er... but I've been gone from Bermuda for twenty-seven years, and... hum, hum ... I don't seem to get at it, somehow, but there's something about you that is just as familiar to me as "
Word Of The Day