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Fires interested me considerably, because I was getting
a good deal of an insurance business started, and
was also training some horses and building some steam
fire-engines, with an eye to a paid fire department by
and by. The priests opposed both my fire and life insurance,
on the ground that it was an insolent attempt
to hinder the decrees of God; and if you pointed out
that they did not hinder the decrees in the least, but
only modified the hard consequences of them if you
took out policies and had luck, they retorted that that
was gambling against the decrees of God, and was
just as bad. So they managed to damage those industries
more or less, but I got even on my Accident
business. As a rule, a knight is a lummox, and some
times even a labrick, and hence open to pretty poor
arguments when they come glibly from a superstition-monger,
but even HE could see the practical side
of a thing once in a while; and so of late you couldn't
clean up a tournament and pile the result without finding
one of my accident-tickets in every helmet.
We stood there awhile, in the thick darkness and
stillness, looking toward the red blur in the distance,
and trying to make out the meaning of a far-away
murmur that rose and fell fitfully on the night. Sometimes
it swelled up and for a moment seemed less
remote; but when we were hopefully expecting it to
betray its cause and nature, it dulled and sank again,
carrying its mystery with it. We started down the hill
in its direction, and the winding road plunged us at
once into almost solid darkness -- darkness that was
packed and crammed in between two tall forest walls.
We groped along down for half a mile, perhaps, that
murmur growing more and more distinct all the time.
the coming storm threatening more and more, with
now and then a little shiver of wind, a faint show of
lightning, and dull grumblings of distant thunder. I
was in the lead. I ran against something -- a soft
heavy something which gave, slightly, to the impulse
of my weight; at the same moment the lightning glared
out, and within a foot of my face was the writhing face
of a man who was hanging from the limb of a tree!
That is, it seemed to be writhing, but it was not. It
was a grewsome sight. Straightway there was an earsplitting
explosion of thunder, and the bottom of
heaven fell out; the rain poured down in a deluge.
No matter, we must try to cut this man down, on the
chance that there might be life in him yet, mustn't
we? The lightning came quick and sharp now, and
the place was alternately noonday and midnight. One
moment the man would be hanging before me in an
intense light, and the next he was blotted out again in
the darkness. I told the king we must cut him down.
The king at once objected.
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