Under the thick blanket of snow the outlaw town looked almost beautiful. It was wrong to consider it an outlaw town, he reflected, for it was anything but that. The good people always outnumbered the bad, only they made less noise and attracted less attention.
(from The Rustlers of West Fork, by Louis L'Amour)
Men of criminal instincts and aspirations are men born with and filled with suspicion. They live with the cherished idea that all men are out for their own interests. They judge others by themselves; hence, seeds of suspicion fall on fertile soil and easily flower into a lot of trouble.
(from The Rustlers of West Fork, by Louis L'Amour)
You no doubt know of Daniel Boone, and probably have heard of his older brother, Squire. What you might now know is that Squire's middle name was Maugridge, and that he was a "junior."
There are towns that are born hot from the ferment of hell, towns blasted into being on the edge of a cattle trail, the end of a railroad, or the site of a gold or silver strike. Not often do these towns last. They are like some evil plant startled into quick growth by the sin that spawns it, and dying when the price of the sin can no longer be paid. The West has known man such towns, and many a sun-blasted hillside preserves their foundations and ruined walls.
(from The Rustlers of West Fork, by Louis L'Amour)
"If a man says he can play a piano," he said quietly," you got to have a piano handy to prove he's a liar. If a man says he's a bronc peeler, you got to get him in the saddle to find out if he can back up his brag, but if a man walks like a fighter an' carries guns like a fighter, then all you got to do to find out if he's a windbag is start somethin'."
(from The Rustlers of West Fork, by Louis L'Amour)
"From Texas?"
"From a lot of places. what's on your mind, Goff? You opened, an' I called you. Now what have you got?"
Goff laughed. "Smart! he said, smiling. "I like that. Men who don't tll all they know are few and far between."
"When I was a boy," Hopalong said quietly, "I used to hear tht a fool's tongue was long enough to cut his throat."
(The Rustlers of West Fork, by Louis L'Amour)
Hitherto, I should mention, my nephew's poetry, for he belonged to the modern fearless school, had always been stark and rhymeless and had dealt principally with corpses and the smell of cooking cabbage.
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
His mood was Hamlet-like - wavering, irresolute. Reason told him that this thing had got to be done: but, as he told Reason, nobody was going to make him like it.
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Seems to me ou've told us about your nephew Archibald before. Was he the one who had the trouble with the explorer?"
"That was Osbert."
"The one who stammered?"
"No. That was George."
"You seem to have so many nephews."
"I have been singularly blessed in that respect," agreed Mr. Mulliner. "But, as regards Archibald, it may serve to recall him to you if I mention that he was generally considered to be London's leading exponent of the art of imitating a hen laying an egg."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"She'll give you the devil when you get back," [Pongo] said, with not a little relish. I wouldn't be in your shoes for something. When you tell Aunt Jane," he said, with confidence, for he knw his Aunt Jame's emotional nature, "that you slipped her entire roll to a girl, and explain, as you will have to explain, that she was an extraordinarily pretty girl - a girl, in fine, who looked like something out of a beauty chorus of the better sort, I should think she would pluck down one of the ancestral battle-axes from the wall and jolly well strike you on the mazzard."
"Have no anxiety, my dear boy," said Lord Ickenham. "It is like your kind heart to be so concerned, but have no anxiety. I shall tell her that I was compelled to give the money to you to enable you to buy back some compromising letters from a Spanish demi-mondaine. She will scarcely be able to blame me for rescuing a fondly-loved nephew from the clutches of an adventuress. It may be that she will feel a little vexed with you for a while, and that you may have to allow a certain time to elapse before you visit Ickenham again, but then I shan't be wanting you at Ickenham till the ratting season starts, so all is well."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Ah," said Lord Ickenham. "The vet wishes to speak to me. Yes, vet?" This seemed to puzzle the cerise bloke a bit.
"I thought you said this chap was your son."
"If I had a son," said Lord Ickenham, a little hurt, "he would be a good deal better-looking than that. No, this is the local veterinary surgeon. I may have said I looked on him as a son. Perhaps that was what confused you."
He shifted across to Pongo and twiddled his hands enquiringly. Pongo gaped at him, and it was not until one of the hands caught him smartly in the lower reps that he remembered he was deaf and started to twiddle back. Considering that he wasn't supposed to be dumb, I can't see why he should have twiddled, but no doubt there are moments when twiddling is about all a fellow feels himself equal to. For what seemed to him at least ten hours Pongo had been undergoing great mental stress, and one can't blame him for not being chatty. Anyway, be that as it may, he twiddled.
"I cannot quite understand what he says," announced Lord Ickenham at length, "because he sprained a finger this morning and that makes him stammer. But I gather he wishes to have a word with me in private. Possibly my parrot has got something the matter with it which he is reluctdant to mention even in sign language in front of a young unmarried girl. You know what parrots are. We will step outside."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"And when Henry Parker had all that fuss with the bank it was touch and go they didn't send him to prison. Between ourselves, Connie, has a bank official, even a brother of your husband, any right to sneak fifty pounds from the till in order to put it on a hundred to one shot for the Grand National? Not quite playing the game, Connie. Not the straight bat. Henry, I grant you, won five thousand of the best and never looked back afterwards, but, though we applaud his judgment of form, we must surely look askance at his financial methods."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Now, Freddie's views on babies are well defined. He is prepared to cope with them singly, if all avenues of escape are blocked and there is a nurse or mother standing by to lend air in case of sudden hiccoughs, retchings, or nauseas. Under such conditions he has even been known to offer his watch to one related by ties of blood in order that the little stranger might listen to the tick-tock. But it would be paltering with the truth to say that he likes babies. They give him, he says, a sort of grey feeling. He resents their cold stare and the supercilious and up-stage way in which they dribble out the corner of their mouths on seeing him. Eyeing them, he is conscious of doubts as to whether Man can really be Nature's last word.
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Whatever is the matter, Mortimer?"
"Let me get at the man who hit me in the eye with a cat."
"A cat?" Lady Prenderby's voice sounded perplexed. "Are you sure?"
"Sure? What do you mean sure? Of course I'm sure. I was just dropping off to sleep in my hammock, when suddenly a great beastly cat came whizzing through the air and caught me properly in the eyeball. It's a nice thing. A man can't sleep in hammocks in his own garden without people pelting him with cats. I insist on the blood of the man who threw that cat."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
He realized that he had a lot of tense thinking to do, and to assist thought he sat down on the bed. Or, to be accurate, on the dead cat which was lying on the bed. It was this cat which the Alsatian had been licking just before the final breach in his relations with Freddie - the object, if you remember, which the later had supposed to be a cushion.
He leaped up as if the corpse, instead of being cold, had been piping hot. He stared down, hoping against hope that the animal was merely in some sort of coma. But a glance told him that it had made the great change. He had never seen a deader cat. After life's fitful fever it slept well.
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I met Dahlia Prenderby once," said the Egg. "I thought she seemed a nice girl."
"Freddie thought so, too. He loved her madly."
"And lost her, of course?"
"Absolutely."
"Do you know," said a thoughtful Bean, "I'll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved and lost were placed end to end - not that I suppose one could do it - they would reach half-way down Piccadilly."
"Further than that," said the Egg. "Some of them were pretty tall. What beats me is why he ever bothers to love them. They always turn him down in the end. He might just as well never begin. Better, in fact, because in the time saved he could be reading some good book."
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"She said you had in herited the Mulberry Tree, and she wanted you to run it as a going concern."
"That's right. We've been arguing about it for weeks."
"I must say I agree with her that you ought to have a pop at it. There's gold in them thar hills, Blister. You might clean up big as a jolly innkeeper. And as for giving up your art - well, why not? It's obviously lousy."
"I feel that, now that I've had time to think it over. Seeing her leg it like that sort of opened my eyes. Have you ever seen the girl you love sprinting away from you having hysterics?"
"No, now you mention it, I can't say I have. I've known Aggie to throw her weight about on occasion, but always in a fairly static manner. Unpleasant, I should imagine."
"It does something to you, Freddie. It makes you realize that you've been a brute and a cad and a swine."
(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
There was something about the girl's exquisite petiteness and fragility that appealed to Nelson Cork's depths. After having wasted so much time looking at a female Carnera like Diana Punter, it was a genuine treat to him to be privileged to feast the eyes on one so small and dainty. And, what with one thing and another, he found the most extraordinary difficulty in lugging Percy into the conversation.
They strolled along, chattaing. And, mark you, Elizabeth Bottsworth is a girl a fellow could chat with without getting a crick in the neck from goggling up at her, the way you had to do when you took the air with Diana Punter. Nelson realized now that talking to Diana Punter had been like trying to exchange thoughts with a flag-pole sitter.
(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Maiden Eggesford, like so many of our rural hamlets, is not at its best and brightest on a Sunday. When you have walked down the main street and looked at the Jubilee Watering-Trough, there is nothing much to do except go home and then come out again and walk down the main street one more and take another look at the Jubilee Watering-Trough.
