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Updated: June 2, 2025
On the side facing the lake he found the source of the cook's intoxication. A tall and swarthy lumberjack squatted on his haunches, gabbling in the Chinook jargon to a klootchman and a wizen-featured old Siwash. The Indian woman was drunk beyond any mistaking, affably drunk. She looked up at Benton out of vacuous eyes, grinned, and extended to him a square-faced bottle of Old Tim gin.
His pulses, which, but a few minutes past, were throbbing and pounding like drums in his ears, seemed now to flow and beat in very quiet. Was this, then, the way that murderers felt, that men felt who took human life so frozen, so little a part of their surroundings? Did they move as dead men among the living, devitalised, vacuous calm? His life had been suddenly twisted out of recognition.
No blame whatever, one would say, if he had been less, copious, or not so subservient, in recording the lady's utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady's assuredly was here and there, she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of holding it up to the withering glare of print: she herself, quoting an obscure maximmonger, says of these lapidary sentences, that they have merely 'the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit, and tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides flattering the world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are golden.
He could but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he should find it more attainable.
The same instant there came a blinding, dazzling light; then, that awful vacuous rattle in the throat of thunder that tells it comes in the name of Death the destroyer. "'Oh, Allie, come away! I screamed. "In obedience to my wish, she leaned towards me; but, oh, her face! I caught her, ere she fell, even. I sent out the wings of my voice, but no one heard me, no one came.
Or am I bound to assume that bored and vacuous countenance which some young men consider good form? Come, my dear Pamela, pray let us be reasonable. Here are you and I settled for life beside the domestic hearth. We have no children. We are not particularly well off it will be as much as we shall be able to do, by-and-by, to make both ends meet. We are neither of us getting younger.
Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands.
"Why, for what could the man ask such a price?" Arden asked, with light surprise. In a moment the other's large and vacuous countenance became sober enough. "For a trap to catch flies," he said, shortly, and turning his shoulder to all but the men of highest rank, again wetted his throat, then let his empty tankard touch the board with a clattering sound.
Let the whole incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life." "You are very kind, Mr. Holmes, but I cannot do that. I shall be true to Hosmer. He shall find me ready when he comes back." For all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was something noble in the simple faith of our visitor which compelled our respect.
"I'd be willing to bet a year's pay it 'all started' about six feet from shore in this lake," responded the Master, "and about a fortnight ago." But he spoke it in the depths of his own guiltily exultant heart. Outwardly, he merely grinned; and said with vacuous conviction: "Laddie, you're a grand dog. And, if you didn't win that cup from Lochaber King in one way, you certainly won it in another!"
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