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"What criminal! Why, the one who struck Padre Damaso in the road yesterday afternoon!" "Struck Padre Damaso?" asked several voices. The coadjutor seemed to smile, while Padre Salvi went on: "Yes, and Padre Damaso is now confined to his bed. It's thought that he may be the very same Elias who threw you into the mudhole, señor alferez." Either from shame or wine the alferez's face became very red.
The only rivers round there were barren creeks, the best of them only strings of muddy waterholes, and across the ridge, on the sheep-runs, the creeks were dry gutters, with baked banks and beds, and perhaps a mudhole every mile or so, and dead beasts rotting and stinking every few yards. Gather with the saints at the River, That flows by the throne of God. Peter's voice trembled and broke.
Riding at night, however, exposes one to the danger of making too intimate an acquaintance with some mudhole or some low hanging bough or telegraph wire, but these risks can be avoided by vigilance. The hours of dawn are the coolest of the twenty-four, and more distance can be covered with less fatigue than later in the day.
The merriment was little by little restored, amid questions and comments. "So that's the Elias who threw the alferez into the mudhole," said Leon thoughtfully. "How did that happen? How was it?" asked some of the more curious. "They say that on a very rainy day in September the alferez met a man who was carrying a bundle of firewood.
Farmer Brown's boy scowled, and it made his face very angry-looking. "That's it," he muttered. "Hunters are shooting the Ducks on their way north and have driven the poor things to look for any little mudhole where they can get a little rest. Probably that Duck has been shot at so many times on the Big River that she felt safer over here in the Smiling Pool, little as it is."
The cowboys efforts to drive them away from what was now nothing but a long mudhole, were unavailing. "Something's got to be done!" cried Skinny. "We've lost some already, and more will die soon. We've got to get 'em away from here. But we can't as long as they smell even the mud. What's to be done?" Dave looked gloomily on, but could not answer. Could the engineer solve the problem?
And before he drew near enough to drink he sat many minutes screened by some dusty willows, his eye keen either for watering game or for Zoraida's hirelings who would be watching the waterholes. But, when at last he came on, he found nothing but a jumble of tracks. Ponies had watered here and had trampled the spring into its present resemblance to a mudhole.
A tree grew on the banks of the mud volcano, the sudden caving in of which, under the professor's weight, had precipitated him into it. "If I could get out on that branch," said Zeb, "I might be able to bend it enough to bring my feet over him and then work back toward the edge of the mudhole." "It's worth trying anything is worthy trying," agreed Jack.
You're dis-in-ter-ested!" said Gourlay, but he stumbled on the big word and spoiled the sneer. That angered him, and, "It's likely," he rapped out, "that I'll allow the land round my house to be howked and trenched and made a mudhole of to oblige a wheen things like you!" "Oh oh, but think of the convenience to uth eh eh I mean to the common good," said Allardyce.
Q, which had snaked the battery out of the mudhole in a hurry, was coming on a dead run in order to be on time for the charge. It snatched its guns from the stacks, and lined up like a long flash of blue light. The artillerymen had lashed their jaded horses into a feverish run, swept out into an open space, flung their guns "into battery," and opened with a vicious bang on the rebel works.
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