United States or Gibraltar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Pretty! they're just like young Skidmore only uglier; and just fancy, his mother asked me 'if I was Skidmore's favourite companion, and if he helped me in my studies?" There was a slight laugh at the enormity of Mrs. Skidmore's presumption, and then a long pause, after which some one asked suddenly, "Does any one know whether Chawner really has left this time?"
The rest of the company were seeking out the fallen ones hither and thither, and calling to one another, as they made discoveries, but Shorty only looked for Pete Skidmore. Si and Harry presently came to Gid Mackall's body, lying motionless in a pool of blood that dyed crimson the brown leaves thickly covering the ground.
He stopped to rest after this prodigious literary effort, and wipe the beaded sweat from his brow. He saw little Pete Skidmore looking at him with troubled face. "What're you doin' up, Pete? Lay down and go to sleep." "Say, Corpril, the Orderly said we wuz goin' to fight a whole passel of rebel cavalry, didn't he?" "Um-hum!" assented Shorty, cudgeling his brain as to what he should next write.
There was nothing really significant in the fact that the body had been discovered soon after the murder of Mr. George Skidmore. Still, there might be a connection between the two incidents. Merrick was going to make inquiries; he was after what looked like a million to one chance.
Alf Russell, the embryonic doctor, who sang a fine tenor, was rendering "Lily Dale" with much impressment, and little Pete Skidmore was "skipping" the flat hill-stones over an adjacent pond. "'Tention!" shouted Si. There was something so different in the tone from that in which Si had before spoken, that it arrested the attention of every one of them instantly.
Skidmore had nothing to worry him, nothing, that is, except the outside chance of a bad accident. He did not anticipate, however, that some miscreant might deliberately wreck the train on the off chance of looting those plain deal boxes. The class of thief that banks have to fear is not guilty of such clumsiness. Unquestionably nothing could happen on this side of Lydmouth.
"You came down with this Sergeant and Corporal, did you? You were recruited for the 200th Ind., were you? You were put under the charge of those men to be taken to your regiment?" he asked Pete Skidmore, at the end of the line. "Yes, sir," blubbered Pete. "And they are always losin' us, particularly me, durn 'em. Spite of all I kin say to 'em they'll lose me, durn their skins."
A corpse in a coffin. In a dark compartment with the blinds down. And, strangely enough, the firm of undertakers who consigned, or were supposed to consign, the body to Lydmouth denied the whole business. Therefore, it is only fair to suppose that the whole thing was a put-up job to get a compartment in the coach that Mr. Skidmore traveled by.
I came out of a Broadway chop-house and started north, when I was stopped by an ill-clad, down-trodden specimen of humanity, who begged me, for the love of Heaven to give him a drink. The poor chap's condition was such that it would have been manslaughter to refuse him, and a moment later I had him before the Skidmore bar, gurgling down a tumblerful of raw brandy as though it were water.
"We are still layin' in camp, but expectin' every day orders to move out for a little soshable with Mister Joe Johnston, whose roostin over on Pigeon Mountain. When we git at him, there won't be no pigeon about it, but a game ov fox-and- geese with us for the foxes. "Little Pete Skidmore is in the company, all rite.
Word Of The Day