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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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handkerchief, and the right trouser leg was ripped from knee to ankle. ‘How much did the other mug get?’ the saloon-keeper demanded. ‘A hundred,’ was the reply. ‘Wouldn’t take a sou less, so help me.’ ‘That makes a hundred and fifty,’ the saloon-keeper calculated, ‘and he’s worth it, or I’m a squarehead.’ The kidnapper undid the bloody wrappings and looked at his lacerated hand. ‘If I don’t get the hydrophoby-’ ‘It’ll be because you were born to hang,’ laughed the saloon-keeper. ‘Here, lend me a hand before you pull your freight,’ he added. Dazed, suffering intolerable pain from throat and tongue, with the life half throttled out of him, Buck attempted to face his tormentors. But he was thrown down and choked repeatedly, till they succeeded in filing the heavy brass collar from off his neck. Then the rope was removed, and he was flung into a cage-like crate. There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled open, expecting to see the Judge, or the boys at least. But each time it was the bulging face of the saloon-keeper that peered in at him by the sickly light of a tallow candle. And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage growl. But the saloon-keeper let him alone, and in the morning four men entered and picked up the crate. More tormentors, Buck decided, for they were evil-looking creatures, ragged and unkempt; and he stormed and raged at them through the bars. They only laughed and poked sticks at him, which he promptly assailed with his teeth till he realised that that was what they wanted. Whereupon he lay down sullenly and allowed the crate to be lifted into a waggon. Then he, and the crate in which he was imprisoned, began a passage through many hands. Clerks in the express office took charge of him; he was carted about in another waggon; a truck carried him, with an assortment of boxes and parcels, upon a ferry steamer; he was trucked off the steamer into a great railway depot, and finally he was deposited in an express car. |
