United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The next morning, all being quiet, the Buchanan boat was launched. A couple of fairish paddles were chipped out of bits of driftwood, and a towline a hundred feet long was made of lariats. Thurstane further provisioned the cockle-shell with fishing tackle, a sounding line, his own rifle, Shubert's musket and accoutrements, a bag of hard bread, and a few pounds of jerked beef.
He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a mass of strips of fresh hide. "Hoss skin," he explained. "Peeled off a mustang. Borrowed it from that Texan cuss. Thought likely we might want to splice our towline. 'Bout ten fathom, I reckon; 'n' there's the lariat, two fathom more. All we've got to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, 'n' travel."
The lieutenant had no sort of anxiety on the score of his enterprise. His plan was to swing out into the current, and, if the boat proved perfectly manageable, to cut loose from the towline and paddle across, sounding the whole breadth of the channel. It seemed easy enough and safe enough.
The boat began to fly down the current; then the two oarsmen fell to paddling violently; what did it mean? Far from guessing that the towline had snapped, she was not aware that there was one. On went the boat; presently it whirled around helplessly; it was nearing the rocks of the rapid; there was evidently danger.
Jack gave her a meaning bump on the arm it meant, "let me do the talking," and Cora understood perfectly. "But where are we going?" wailed Belle, as the man threw the towline to Ed. "Not far," answered the man. "I just have to take you in, and then you have to do the rest." "What's the rest?" inquired Walter. "Oh, pay a fine," said the man carelessly. "How much?" inquired Ed.
There are four figures in this group men drawing a heavy freight boat along the shore by means of a towline passed round their bodies, on which they throw their weight in such a way that their legs, pressed together, lose their outline except in the case of the leader and are as a mass of power. They also pull on the line with their hands.
One man steered the boat, another in the bow managed the towline, and a third, who walked on land, drove the dogs. We had seven canines three pairs and a leader pulling upon a deerskin towline fastened to a thole-pin. It was the duty of the man in the bow to regulate the towline according to circumstances. The dogs were unaccustomed to their driver, and balky in consequence.
Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying what next?
"I can put the skiff out, get the bark's line, haul it back, an' make it fast on the bitts you two skunks has been occupyin' instead of a prison cell." "Hello! There's another county gone Democratic. Your old man must ha' been to sea once an' told you about it. Them bitts won't hold." "I'll make the towline fast to the mainmast." "That'll hold, I admit.
In a few seconds, impelled from the shore by the paddles, the boat was at the full length of the towline and in the middle of the boiling current. "Will it never break?" thought Coronado, smoking a little faster than usual, but not moving a muscle. Yes. It had already broken. At the first pause in the paddling the mangled lariat had given way.
Word Of The Day