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The snow was in a plastic state, and at each step I kicked my toes well in, so wedging my footing. The view down was very unnerving. It soon grew so bad I fixed my thought solely on making each step secure, and went slowly, which was much against my inclination. In this manner we tacked gradually upward in zigzags, some forty feet apart, each of us improving the footprints of his predecessor.
About an hour before noon, while Calumet, in woolen shirt and overalls, his face dirty, his hair tousled, and his temper none too good, was wedging the sill tight against the studding above it, he became aware of Betty standing near him. She nodded toward the sill. "That makes an improvement already," she said. "Ye-es?" he said, with an irritating drawl.
The small thigh-pads afforded a good rough hold, and the next buck jammed the poor fellow well under the seat of the saddle. The position was neither pleasant nor dignified, though certainly more secure for an amateur than the conventional style; particularly after the horse's tremendous plunges had raised the back of the saddle a foot or more by dint of fair wedging.
It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the ship's side.
For a time, the attack wavered; the negroes wedging themselves to beat it back; the half-repelled sailors, as yet unable to gain a footing, fighting as troopers in the saddle, one leg sideways flung over the bulwarks, and one without, plying their cutlasses like carters' whips. But in vain.
Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts, would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice."
A set of riffle-bars is as many as fill one half of a box. They are wedged in, from an inch to two inches apart; the wedging being used, because the bars can more readily be fastened in their places, and more easily taken up, than if nails were used.
As he uttered these repining words, stooping to dip the canteen with which he was provided, in the water, a little canoe, darting forward with a velocity that seemed produced by the combined strength of the current and the rower, shot suddenly among the rocks and bushes at the entrance of the ravine, wedging itself fast among them, and a human figure leaped from it to the shore.
There was a risk that in wedging the extra prop the man might loosen the first; and then, if neither was able to bear the load, the rock above would fall and bury him. For all that, Driscoll looked undisturbed and did not stop until he had carefully driven the timber into its proper place. Then he turned to Scott and his glance was slow and dull. "I want you to send two of the boys along."
With reason assuring him that the gambler was merely making a grand-stand play for the benefit of the bar-room crowd wedging itself in Biggs's doorway, Lidgerwood's lips went dry, and he knew that the haunting terror was slipping its humiliating mask over his face. But before he could say or do any fear-prompted thing a diversion came.
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