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There were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker and one or two professional spielers, perhaps.
Ike gave his head a jerk towards the cart, and I ran and looked over the tailboard, to see a heap of sacks and some straw, but no Shock. In one corner, though, there was a strongly made boot, and I took hold of that, to find it belonged to something alive, for its owner began to kick fiercely.
He dropped the tailboard, backed around, and got a bag on his shoulders. With this he staggered toward the house. "Oh, Gummy!" screamed Janice, "what have you got in that sack?" "Salt," replied the boy, panting up the steps. "Half a shushal of balt. I was takin' it out to Jones's.
"Whoa, dar, Boomerang!" he shouted. Then, as the tailboard of the wagon swung past him, he reached out and grabbed it. Perhaps he thought he could bring the runaway mule up standing, but, if he did, he was grievously disappointed. Boomerang pulled his master along the gravel walk, and kept running in spite of Eradicate's command to "whoa, dar!"
For a fairly sensible, hard-headed fellow it was pretty quick work, I acknowledge; but let any man have seven years of Western life without seeing a woman worth speaking of, and then meet Miss Cullen, and if he didn't do as I did, I wouldn't trust him on the tailboard of a locomotive, for I should put him down as defective both in eyesight and in intellect.
And I may add that to these general characteristics she brought the waywardness of her capricious sex. She came to me out of the rolling dust of an emigrant wagon, behind whose tailboard she was gravely trotting.
Familiarity makes death as natural as life. We accepted his offer one of our men sitting on the tailboard of the wagon; and in this gory chariot we rode slowly through Broadway, deserted now by everything but crime. The shops had all been broken open; dead bodies lay here and there; and occasionally a burned block lifted its black arms appealingly to heaven.
He stood six feet in his stockings and weighed two hundred and ten pounds, and could toss a barrel of salt on the tailboard of a wagon without losing his happy smile. He was twenty-seven years old, and there was not a farmer in the county who could beat him at feats of strength or endurance, and few indeed who could keep pace with him. He had black hair and blue eyes.
And with what a joyous rollic, with what a lively clatter, with what a hilarious reeling, as though in gay defiance of the law of gravity, was it using its liberty! Had it been a hearse in a runaway, the comedy would not have been better. If I had been younger I would have pelted after and climbed in over the tailboard to share the reckless pitch of its enfranchisement.
Accordingly, a few days later, the man to whom the shepherd in Wilsdruf had sold them did actually appear with the horses, thin and staggering, tied to the tailboard of his cart, and led them to the market-place in Dresden. As the bad luck of Sir Wenzel and still more of honest Kohlhaas would have it, however, the man happened to be the knacker from Döbeln.
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