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He brought the rope forward over the cloaked head and drew the noose in tautly, with the knot adjusted to fit snugly just under the left ear, so that the hood took on the semblance of a well-filled, inverted bag with its puckered end fluting out in the effect of a dark ruff upon the hunched shoulders of its wearer.
There would follow a quick shifting of the big, gnarled hands over the unresisting body of the doomed man, and almost instantly, so it seemed to those who watched, all was in order: the arms of the murderer drawn rearward and pressed in close against his ribs by a broad girth encircling his trunk at the elbows, his wrists caught together in buckled leather cuffs behind his back; his knees and his ankles fast in leathern loops which joined to the rest of the apparatus by means of a transverse strap drawn tautly down the length of his legs, at the back; the black-cloth head-bag with its peaked crown in place; the noose fitted; the hobbled and hooded shape perhaps swaying a trifle this way and that; and Uncle Tobe on his tiptoes stepping swiftly over to a tilted wooden lever which projected out and upward through the planked floor, like the handle of a steering oar.
If he spoke at this moment he must speak in violent passion and bitter denunciation, and so with his hands tautly clutched at his back he held his counsel and paced the floor. Old Tom Burton's unaccustomed hours in the confinement of convalescence had left him petulant. The courtesy of the stranger's argument was lost upon him.
The end of the gold thread, which by now, in readiness for working, will be wound upon the bobbin or spindle, must be passed through to the back at the starting-point, the top left-hand corner in the diagram. It now encircles the gold thread which the left hand draws out rather tautly, and then returns by the same hole to the back, pulling the metal thread through with it.
Her mother would have kept a firmer hand upon the helm if I had not always spoken up for the lass, and said, 'Let her have her head; don't check the sheets in too tautly. I see I was wrong now.
The alertness was especially noticeable; every soldier was tautly at 'tention when the boss warrior hove in sight. General Totten was portly and came down hard on his heels with an elderly man's slumping gait, and his sword clattered loudly and his movements were as well advertised as those of a belled cat in a country kitchen.
The result was that, when the job was finished, the gig was almost completely covered in by the tautly stretched sail, which I hoped would not only afford a considerable amount of protection to her crew, but would also keep out the breaking seas that would otherwise be almost certain to swamp her.
In the peaceful days before the war it had, no doubt, been used by a Belgian farmer to water his fields. But now Jack saw something that set his heart a-flutter. From the dome-like crest of the windmill stretched a number of wires tautly drawn and leading away to some point beyond his range of view. For a moment he contemplated the scene in silence with tingling nerves.
But, at the same time, even the faces that were most exposed to view, and therefore most tautly under control, disclosed a sudden impulsive tremor which, unless directly checked, would have developed into an outburst of laughter. The first sight of Mr. Rodney was irresistibly ludicrous.
The whippletree, dangling from the end over the beaten circular track, seemed cracked with heat and age. The stout rope that stretched tautly from the coil passed over a wooden wheel, and disappeared through a broad-framed aperture into the bowels of the earth.
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