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Higher up the twenty-foot walls, heads of sambhur, markor, and the lesser deer of the Himalayas showed dimly in the light of one lowered lamp. Skins of bear and leopard, and one or two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath.
A burst of handclapping from the girls drew his eyes to the Little Lady drawing herself out of the tank at the other end. Again he ran down the side of the tank, and again she climbed the scaffold. But this time his wind and endurance enabled him to cut down her lead, so that she was driven to the twenty-foot platform.
They terraced it a stone wall, and good masonry, six feet high, a level terrace six feet wide; up and up, walls and terraces, the same thing all the way, straight into the air, walls upon walls, terraces upon terraces, until I've seen ten-foot walls built to make three-foot terraces, and twenty-foot walls for four or five feet of soil they could grow things on.
"Sure!" answered the other boy. "But you ought to see their arms. Neither one of 'em is big, but if you saw their arms you'd know how they swing those twenty-foot steering oars. I got a hankerin' after those fellows.
Save him!" cried the boy, wrenching from his poor bruised sides the very rope his enemy had secured him with. Larry snatched it, crashing down the shore in the vain hope of reaching the drifting body. The canoe was up in the woods where they had dropped it at the sound of Jack's gunshots. He could not begin to get near enough with that twenty-foot rope.
The casks were made watertight, the timber was made ready, the twenty-foot bank cut down to provide an easy grade for traffic, and the actual test was on. There was never a hitch. One party of men lashed the barrels to the heavy planks, and, as soon as that operation was complete, another party lifted the pier and carried it down the bank.
There were men to the wheel that day who could handle big fishermen as if they were cat-boats, who would have dared and did, later, dare to sail their vessels as close to a mark in this sea as men sail a twenty-foot knockabout in the smoothest of waters inshore only with the fishermen a slip-up meant the loss of a vessel, maybe other vessels too, and twenty-five or fifty lives perhaps.
At almost the same hour in which Sam Carr and his daughter held that intimate conversation on the porch of their home a twenty-foot Peterborough freight canoe was sliding down the left-hand bank of the Athabasca like some gray river-beast seeking the shade of the birch and willow growth that overhung the shore.
And then Joe went back to the table and ate his breakfast quickly. He wolfed it. He had an appointment to meet that minute speck some 4,000 miles out in space. His appointment was for a very few hours hence. He'd been training for just this morning's effort since before the Platform's launching. There was a great box swinging in twenty-foot gimbal rings over in the Shed.
Theodolinda was looking at the five small bodies. She raised one of them gently, and sniffed gingerly. "Virgil," she said solemnly, "this is not mere slumber. These birds are drunk!" Quimbleton was about to speak when a grasshopper went by like an airplane, zooming in a twenty-foot leap.
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