United States or Bermuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The strands of lean muscle about his emaciated mouth worked, and he made a little pressure of his sun-blackened hand on the deck, as if to verify its steepness and his own balance. The mainmast was some seven or eight yards away.... He put one stiff leg under him and began, seated as he was, to make shuffling movements down the slope.
And when once you have paid this price, you will not care for photographs of landscape. They are not true, though they seem so. They are merely spoiled nature. If it is not human design you are looking for, there is more beauty in the next wayside bank than in all the sun-blackened paper you could collect in a lifetime.
They smoked and talked and swore softly in hushed tones and waited the return of Texas Joe. It was after midnight when he came again. Before he could dismount, the crowd of silent men hemmed him in. From the saddle the old plainsman looked down into their eager solemn faces and that slow smile broke over his sun-blackened features.
His canvas coat was rolled and tied behind his sweating shoulders; his too-short sleeves had bothered him and they were now cut off at the elbow and exposed the sun-blackened forearms; his overalls streamed in rags over his scarred boots. He pushed the battered hat far back on his head and looked at the silent, attentive line of idlers who sat on the veranda. "Excuse me, gents," he said mildly.
They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword.
He was still stiff and proud, but a swift smile crossed his face as he looked down upon us, half-naked and sun-blackened there in our dinky little craft. "Captain," I cried, and perhaps there was the least vainglory in me; "I talked to you at Benton." "Yes, sir." "Well, I have found that water!" Tell a Teuton that he can't, and very likely he will show you that he can. It's in the blood.
The Maxwells bowed to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were passing ball near them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot.
At that moment it seemed as if there were two boys in the camp, and that these two were sun-blackened, toil-roughened Joses, and Bart. For these two could not conceal their eagerness to be of the hunting party, and every now and then Joses kept stealing a quick, animal-like glance at Bart, while the latter kept glancing as sharply at the frontiersman.
A matted frail of dates swung ponderously in air, there were baled goatskins and sacks of Mocha coffee, sagging baskets of reddish unwashed gum copal carried in bulk, and a sun-blackened mate smoking a rat-tail Dutch cigar was supervising the moving of elephant tusks in a milky glimmer of ivory ashore.
Lawrence Teck remained as before, his bearded face bowed down; but a slight tremor of horror passed through his shoulders under the sun-blackened skin. The Dances of the Moon! Yes, he had seen them, one time when he was weak from fever and despair.
Word Of The Day