Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Not in vain had he bound him with double ropes; for he would have been called to a severe reckoning at home had this particular man escaped. But while he was feeling the ropes on the prisoner's arms, the glare of the burning torch, which lighted him, fell on the fugitive's rude, deserted couch. There, as if in mockery, lay the gnawed rope.
There was the sharp challenge of a guard, unanswered; the futile hiss of a weapon. The improvised shield wedged on a narrowing stairway. Tolto let it stick, ran up alone. The stairway went round and round, climbing ever higher. The fugitive's lungs were bursting. At last he came to an airlock. He did not know how to operate it, so smashed through.
To the remainder of the fugitive's tale she listened intently, often interrupting him with sympathizing questions. The torturing days and nights of the past, which had reached such a happy termination, seemed now like a blissful dream, a bewildering fairy-tale, and the goblet she constantly replenished was not needed to lend fire to his narrative.
A black walnut folding-bed, exactly underneath the pulpit from which the minister of Polwarth preached every Sunday, was the fugitive's resting-place at night, while for a month he saw no more daylight than was able to reach him from a slit at one end of the vault.
"Of course I don't speak of the people. They are brutes," added Razumov, in the same subdued but forcible tone. At this, a protesting murmur issued from the "heroic fugitive's" beard. A murmur of authority. "Say children." "No! Brutes!" Razumov insisted bluntly. "But they are sound, they are innocent," the great man pleaded in a whisper. "As far as that goes, a brute is sound enough."
The article she feared to see was upon the first page of the paper. A Fugitive's Story of the Christmas-Week Execution in Granadas District John Makepiece Tells His Story in Cida; His Fellow-Prisoner, Broxton Day, Fills One of Raphele's "Christmas Graves" Janice Day could never have told how long she sat there, elbows on the bureau, eyes glued to those black lines on the newspaper page.
There was no resisting the man's appeal. A rope ladder was lowered, and a Chilean sailor went down in obedience to the captain's order, though he disliked the job, and crossed himself before descending. He passed a rope under the fugitive's armpits, and, with aid from the deck, hoisted him aboard.
I knelt down and felt about with my hands: I found a man's body lying inert at my feet. God in Heaven! The darkness seemed to buffet me upon the ears. I heard a vague cry escape my lips, for the fugitive's hand had dropped from mine with a thud upon the stone. The man was dead.
The agonized resolution that turns the panting fugitive's blood and body to fire, the fear, so vividly portrayed that the reader's nerves thrill with the shock that brings the hunted negro's heart almost to his mouth with one wild throb, the matchless picture of the forest and marsh, lengthening and widening with dizzy swell to the weary eye and failing brain, all are the work of a master of language.
The next minute, as they thundered along, Samson rode straight at the man with the morion over his eyes, but before he could reach him the fugitive's horse made a poor attempt to clear a bush in his way, stumbled, fell headlong, and shot his rider half a dozen yards in front. "Prisoners; and don't hurt them," shouted Fred, waving his sword, and his men gave an answering yell.
Word Of The Day