“Right!” said my uncle, with a laugh of joyous confidence.
Now, I don’t know if the first test had amounted to no more than a little soft extra persuasion applied to an already tottering article. I know only that that success was not to be repeated.
“Right!” said Uncle Jenico; and the wheel turned under our hands, tightened, and began to scream as before, only infinitely more distressfully. We strained our mightiest, putting our backs into it.
“It gives, I think,” said Uncle Jenico, in a suffocating voice.
And with the word, an explosive lash whistled by my ear, the machine bounded and pitched, and there were we rolling on the sand amidst a mad wreck of everything.
We were neither of us hurt. Uncle Jenico sat up ruefully. Mr. Sant came running to us across the sand.
“Anybody killed?” he panted, as he rushed up.
Nobody, by God’s mercy! It was the nearest shave. If I had had a whisker, it would have been shorn off, I think. The rope had snapped like a piece of string, and we were right in the path of its recoil.
“Anyhow, I suppose we moved the thing a little?” said Uncle Jenico.
“Not an inch,” was the answer.