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So he devised a certain kind of concrete crib, the first one was driven and when they got it down beneath quicksand and water about twenty-five feet, it hung up on a boulder! You see, below the stratum of sand like saturated oatmeal, below the water and quicksand, they had come upon something like a New England pasture, as thick with big boulders as a bun with currants!
'We ought to be squaring our accounts, he thought 'looking things in the face. Something must be done; and here she is laughing and making everyone stare! Done! But what could be done, when it was all like quicksand? The other little tables emptied one by one. "George," she said, "take me somewhere where we can dance!" George stared at her. "My dear girl, how can I? There is no such place!"
They had left two men in the boat, who, as I found afterwards, having drank a little too much brandy, fell asleep; however, one of them waking sooner than the other, and finding the boat too fast aground for him to stir it, hallooed for the rest who were straggling about, upon which they all soon came to the boat but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand.
Arising, without disturbing his wife, he sought his shoes. The chalk signatures were undisturbed! He dressed himself and stole out softly. This time the tide was in, so he crossed the dunes and struck the shore on the further side of the quicksand. There, oh, horror of horrors! he saw his own footprints dying into the abyss! He went home a desperately sad man.
It was an ugly little stream, with much mire and some quicksand to be avoided; with deep earth-canyons and sliding avalanches of dirt on steep slopes, and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied.
Of these, that to the south, and inside the bay, is motionless, and bears the name of the 'Dead-Boy; but the 'Quick-Boy, to the north, shifts continually. It is a quicksand, in short; and will swallow a man in three minutes. "My mind," resumed my companion, "was soon made up. There is no murder, thought I, where there is no corpse.
He seemed about to attack her again, and his hands were raised as though to grasp her throat, when there came a sound at the door, it swung open, and Dakota stepped in, closing the door behind him. Dakota's face was white white as it had been that other day at the quicksand crossing when Sheila had looked up to see him sitting on his pony, watching her.
But they had scarcely been commenced when it was discovered that, at an interval between the two trial-shafts which had been sunk, about 200 yards from the south end of the tunnel, there existed an extensive quicksand under a bed of clay 40 feet thick, which the borings had escaped in the most singular manner.
"What makes you think, Farnsworth, that the railroad can win out with the desert and lay tracks across the quicksand? That's a bad quicksand, you know. It has been called the 'Man-killer. Many a prospector or cow-puncher has lost his life in trying to get over that sand." "The real Man-killer quicksand is a mile to the south of where the tracks go, isn't it?" asked Farnsworth.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not knowing very well what was to become of him, marched along in terror among them, turning out for the lame, stepping over the cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that ant-hill of lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the quicksand of a swarm of crabs.
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