Rocky Mountain Sam — page 152: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SAM, 143 : ars of death!” she screamed. ‘How awfully you 9, ed ‘If you're not, you’d better let me go, or we will both be in—I won’t say where—in less than five minutes.” She sank away from him as he spoke, and the next in- stant Sam was heaving over ballast as if for dear life. He was not a moment too soon; and, as it was, the car almost scraped the edge of a jagged precipice as it bounded upward into a higher atmosphere. ‘Ill give the old gal a good freeze for this joke she’s played on me,” muttered Sam to himself, as he kept on heaving out the sand without a word. “Dear me!” said Miss Gertrude, shivering, ‘‘ain’t we getting ra-rather high up, Samuel?” “Oh, not very,” said Sam, pausing a moment, and pre- tending to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘‘We ain’t more’n *bout four miles high yet.” ‘‘Hour miles!” echoed the spinster, In serious alarm. “Why, goodness gracious! how many miles do you intend to goup?” “‘Can’t say,” said Sam, tossing over the ballast a little more leisurely; ‘‘but we've got to strike an air-current to fetch us back to the ranch if we go four hundred.” “Four But of course you're joking!” exclaimed the lady, whose teeth began to chatter with the cold. ‘Never was more in earnest in my life,” replied the hun- ter, gravely picking up a roll of blankets and laying them in Miss Yearning’s lap. ‘‘Put these ere fixins around you, and warmupa bit. Why, the thermometer’s only about ten degrees below the freezin’ pint.” ‘Does—does it ever get much lower than that, Sam?” ‘Why, bless your youthfyl heart!” said Sam, appearing to orow confidential and:loquacious. ‘‘Why, the last time the mercury friz in the bulb and busted. The professor thought it by no means surprisin’; and even then we warn’t moren about thirty miles over the surface of the earth.” Miss Yearning’s heart began to faint within her; but Sam’s tongue ran on as though he thought her greatly amused. “The second time, the professor’s nose friz,” said he. ‘‘He told me as how the sensation was rather pleasant than otherwise. It was only when his eye-teeth dropped into his lap an’ the blood began to gush out from under his finger- nails that he began to feel sort of uncomfortable; an’ besides (ele) Eomicbooks