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In an instant he had snatched the roll away and sent the sheets spread-eagling up the street, looking like so many big white butterflies as they flapped and whirled deliriously hither and thither.

In the old days, when one entered Spain by diligence from Bayonne to Pampeluna over the Pyrenees, one learned something of the beauty of the scenery and the healthy, hardy characteristics of the people, as one whirled along through the chestnut groves, over the leaping streams, always at full gallop, up hill and down dale, with a precipice on one side of the road and the overhanging mountains on the other.

He dashed the tree down in front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap against the lintel, calling out: "Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out."

Only now and then, in a strange, projected, wraithlike effect, the moon ray glinted timidly on the tip of a nickel dial, and, ghostlike, disclosed a human hand. Upstairs, Markel coughed again. Then from the safe a whisper, heavy-breathed as from great exertion: "MISSED IT!" The dial whirled with faint, musical, little metallic clicks; then began to move slowly again, very, very slowly.

If it had not been for the smoke, whirled and beaten about by the breeze, she would have thought the house was not really a human habitation, but a bit of the moor itself risen up, so brown and rough and weather-beaten it looked under its old lichen-grown thatch. But the smoke was real smoke, and Esther, stepping nearer, saw one window lit by the leaping, cheery glow of a fire.

Immediately they started for it, keeping their guns in readiness to fire if it, whatever it was, should attempt to escape. When they reached the spot there was not a track visible of any animal. The birds whirled around if possible more noisily than ever, and so it was evident to the men that there was something in that tree.

He took pa up by the collar and whirled him around until pa was dizzy, and then he started with him for the menagerie tent, and called to the boss canvasman: "Bill, come on and tell me which is the hungriest lion, and I will feed him with this cold meat." Pa yelled, 'cause he thought he was in the hands of an escaped lunatic, and the circus hands came and took him away.

Then the reversing lever went forward with a clang, and the steam squealed shrilly in the dry-pipe. For a thunderous second or two the driving-wheels slipped and whirled futilely on the snowy rails. Gallagher pounced upon the sand lever, whereat the tires suddenly bit and held and a long-drawn, fire-tearing exhaust sobbed from the stack. "You've got her!" shouted Ford. "Now hit it hit it hard!"

Something was drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel’s fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance.

He saw the sand whirled into mad dancing columns before the blast which swept across the unsheltered flat, with nothing, for a day's march, to check its force. But the wilderness is not only shelterless, it is waterless too a place in which wild and ravening thirst finds no refreshing draughts, and the tongue cleaves to the blackening gums.