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Phil chafed under this, fearing that he would be obliged to miss the last train out that night, which would again put him on the same train with his rivals next day. One of his men would have a thirty-five-mile drive back after he had finished his day's work. That would bring the man "home," as the return to the car is called, long after midnight in all probability.
As it was fully a thirty-five-mile drive we started at daybreak, and to encourage the mules Quayle and Happersett rode in the lead until sun-up, when they dropped to the rear with Cotton and myself. We did not go by way of Shepherd's, but crossed the river several miles above the ferry, following an old cotton road made during the war, from the interior of the state to Matamoras, Mexico.
"Let's see," he murmured in embarrassment, "it's been so gosh-darn long since I signed my name danged if I can recollect " the pen stuck in his awkward fingers as he swung it about like a lariat. Finally he wrote laboriously "Calvin Aloysius Bancroft." With the signed paper in my hands I saddled Lakota and streaked off for the thirty-five-mile trip to Pierre.
Once he almost lost his grip entirely. But a final effort gave him a leg-hold, and slowly very slowly he climbed over to the leather cushions of the wide seat. If Arima now turned and saw him, almost anything might happen. But before he could become conscious that anyone was near him, Orme was crouching in the tonneau. The car was going at a thirty-five-mile clip.
With well-nursed bullocks, and a full complement of them the "Macs" had twenty-two per waggon for their dry stages a "thirty-five-mile dry" can be "rushed," the waggoners getting under way by three o'clock one afternoon, travelling all night with a spell or two for the bullocks by the way, and "punching" them into water within twenty-four hours.
Fifty miles dry with loaded waggons being the limit for mortal bullocks, the Government breaks the "seventy-five" with a "drink" sent out in tanks on one of the telegraph station waggons. The stage thus broken into "a thirty-five-mile dry," with another of forty on top of that, becomes complicated to giddiness in its backings, and fillings, and goings, and comings, and returnings.
The mule threw back its head, waved its ears, and poured forth a song of triumph, a loud, exultant bray. Crack! Will's rifle. Down went the mule. It had made the fatal mistake of gloating over its villainy. Never again would it jeopardize the life of a rider. It had been a thirty-five-mile walk, and every bone in Will's body ached.
There was a meekness in his manner and speech that deceived people who did not know his reputation. He spoke five languages fluently, and two more indifferently. Along the banks of the thirty-five-mile stretch of river for which he was responsible he had waged incessant warfare on thieves and receivers for thirty years, till now practically all serious crime had disappeared.
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