Romance by Joseph Conrad;Ford Madox Ford
page 14 of 567 (02%)
page 14 of 567 (02%)
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"Get him out on to the road.... I'll tackle the other . . . Darbies. . . . Mind his knife." I was like a confounded rabbit in their hands. One of them had his fist on my collar and jerked me out upon the hard road. We rolled down the embankment, but he was on the top. It seemed an abominable episode, a piece of bad faith on the part of fate. I ought to have been exempt from these sordid haps, but the man's hot leathery hand on my throat was like a foretaste of the other collar. And I was horribly afraid--horribly--of the sort of mysterious potency of the laws that these men represented, and I could think of nothing to do. We stood in a little slanting cutting in the shadow. A watery light before the moon's rising slanted downwards from the hilltop along the opposite bank. We stood in utter silence. "If you stir a hair," my captor said coolly, "I'll squeeze the blood out of your throat, like a rotten orange." He had the calmness of one dealing with an everyday incident; yet the incident was--it should have been--tremendous. We stood waiting silently for an eternity, as one waits for a hare to break covert before the beaters. From down the long hill came a small sound of horses' hoofs--a sound like the beating of the heart, intermittent--a muffled thud on turf, and a faint clink of iron. It seemed to die away unheard by the runner beside me. Presently there was a crackling of the short pine branches, a rustle, and a hoarse whisper said from above: "Other's cleared, Thorns. Got that one safe?" |
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