United States or Saudi Arabia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With a movement that told of straining effort the lolled head came up off the chest. The thin, corded neck stiffened back, rising from a dirty, collarless neckband. The Adam's apple bulged out prominently, as big as a pigeon's egg. "I have come," said the specter in a wheezing rasp of a voice which the chief could hardly hear "I have come to surrender myself. I am Hobart W. Trimm."
He felt the sharp ends of shattered glass tearing and cutting his shin as he jerked free. Recovering himself, he dealt the terrier a lucky kick under the throat that sent it back, yowling, to where it had come from, and then, as a door jerked open and a half-dressed man jumped out into the darkness, Mr. Trimm half hobbled, half fell out of sight behind the woodpile.
Trimm wasn't in the habit of letting men deceive him with idle words. No President would pardon him, and he knew it. "Never mind that, Walling," he said steadily, when the lawyer offered to come to see him again before he started for prison the next day. "If you'll see that a drawing-room on the train is reserved for me for us, I mean and all that sort of thing, I'll not detain you any further.
He had gone perhaps two-thirds of the way when Mr. Trimm felt a queer, grinding sensation beneath his feet; it was exactly as though the train were trying to go forward and back at the same time. Almost slowly, it seemed to him, the forward end of the car slued out of its straight course, at the same time tilting up. There was a grinding, roaring, grating sound, and before Mr.
Trimm left the clearing, heading as well as he could tell eastward, away from the railroad. After a mile or two he came to a dusty wood road winding downhill. To the north of the clearing where Mr. Trimm had halted were a farm and a group of farm buildings.
In another column farther along was more about Banker Trimm; facts about his soiled, selfish, greedy, successful life, his great fortune, his trial, and a statement that, lacking any close kin to claim his body, his lawyers had been notified. Mr. Trimm read the account through to the end, and as he read the sense of dominant, masterful self-control came back to him in waves.
So he stayed, not daring to move, until a dinner horn sounded somewhere in the cluster of cottages beyond, and the smith, closing the doors of his shop, went away with the three yokels. Then Mr. Trimm, stooping low, stole back into the deep woods again.
Trimm saw something white drop from the hands of one of the blue-clad figures on the handcar, unfold into a newspaper and come fluttering back along the tracks toward him. Just as he, starting doggedly ahead, met it, the little ground breeze that had carried it along died out and the paper dropped and flattened right in front of him.
The cuffs, which kept catching on the bark and snagging small fragments of it loose, seemed to Mr. Trimm to have been a part and parcel of him for a long time almost as long a time as he could remember. But the hands which they clasped so close seemed like the hands of somebody else.
Trimm's head was answered at last in the sight of these steel things with their notched jaws. Mr. Trimm stood up and, with a movement as near to hesitation as he had ever been guilty of in his life, held out his hands, backs upward. "I guess you're new at this kind of thing," said Meyers, grinning. "This here way one at a time." He took hold of Mr.
Word Of The Day