The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

The wind might blow great guns, and wipe out the fugitive trail.  He would go no farther.  The wind would attend to the other two men.  He had found water:  he had found life.  God had played the trick; and he had not trumped the ace; four of the six outlaws dead, and the last two hastening to the alkali death across the Desert sands.  He drank again, this time from the cup, sip by sip, slowly, then in deep draughts of God-given waters.

He didn’t thank God in so many words, or in testimony to pass muster at a prayer meeting; but he paused twice on his way back to the saline sink to say:  “He’s on the job.  You bet He’s on the job!” He spent the rest of the week nursing the old frontiersman back to life.

PART II

THE MAN HIGHER UP

CHAPTER XVIII

WITHOUT MALICE

The Senator sat in his office with his hat on the back of his head and a U. S. Geological Survey map spread out on the desk in front of him.  Bat stood sleepily at attention on the other side of the desk with his hat in his hand.  It was a sweltering July afternoon in Smelter City, the air athrob with the derricks and the trucks and the cranes and the pulleys and the steam hoists and the cable car tramway run up and down the face of Coal Hill by natural gravitation.  The light was dusky yellow from the smelter smoke; and loafers round the transcontinental railroad station across the street chose the shady side of the building, where they sat swinging their legs from the platform and aiming tobacco juice with regularity and precision in the exact centre of the gray dusty road.

The Senator wore a pair of pince nez glasses.  He looked up over the top of them through the yellow sun-light of the open street door.

“Declare, Brydges, the damned rascals are too lazy to brush the flies off,” he observed of the brigade of loafers across the street.

Bat threw a glance over his shoulder at the coterie of loafers, and brought his drowsy tortoise-shell glance back to the map lying before the Senator.

“I guess the flies won’t bother ’em long as they vote right, Mr. Senator.”

Moyese was slowly turning and turning the thick stub of a crayon pencil between his thumb and fore finger.  Bat knew that trick of absent-minded motion always presaged senatorial sermonizing, just as the soft laugh down in the crinkles of the white vest forewarned danger. ("When I see the tummy wrinkles coming, I always feel like telling the other fellow to get the button off his fencing sword—­You bet that means business,” Bat often confided to the newseditor.)

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The Freebooters of the Wilderness from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.