Instincts

     The hunter and the hunted - these two are kin. Their senses are alert to the same stimuli, awaken in the same far-off sounds. A shadow in the wrong place, a flicker of sun reflection, a creak of leather - each may be a warning.

    And for these things and a thousand others the senses of hunter and hunted are alert. Often the exact warning is not recognized; it is a subconscious perception.

    So King Mabry now waited for the snow veil to break once more. He had learned to trust his instincts. Attention might lag, reason might fail, but the instincts were first born and would be the last to die.

(from Heller with a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Aunts are worse than cobras down the chimney

 His heart was heavy. It was a kindly heart, and from the very first it had been deeply stirred by the stormy romance of Mr. Ronald and his young lady. He wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories, to which he had become to addicted, portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl. The significance of the presence in the library of Lady Constance Keeble and Lady Julia Fish had not escaped him. He feared that it meant the worst.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Be sure to stand downwind

     "Beach, go and bring Pirbright here."

    "He shall do nothing of the kind," said Lady Constance sharply. "The idea of bringing Pirbright into the library!"

    It was not often that Beach found himself in agreement with the chatelaine of Blandings, but he could not but support her attitude now. Like all butlers, he held definite views on the sanctity of the home and frowned upon attempts on the part of the outside staff to enter it - especially when, like Pirbright they smelt so very strongly of pigs. Five minutes of that richly scented man in the library, felt Beach, and you would have to send the place to the cleaner's.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A friend of pigs

     "You think you can cope with this pig?"

    "Certainly. I am not afraid of pigs. Pigs like me."

    At these words, Monty found his respect for a breed of animal which he had always rather admired waning a good deal. No animal of the right sort, he felt, could like Lord Tilbury.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not a successful interview

     He had never, he realized, been exactly what you might call sanguine when making his way to the Emsworth Arms to plead with Lord Tilbury to act like a sportsman and a gentleman. All the ruling of the form-book, he knew, was against him. And yet he had nursed, despite the whisperings of Reason, a sort of thin, sickly hope. This hope the proprietor of the Mammoth had slain dead within five minutes of his arrival.

    When Monty had claimed consideration on the ground that it was through no fault of his own that he was not charging in, manuscript in hand, Lord Tilbury had remained mute and stony. When he had gone on to point out that Pilbeam could not have got the thing but for him, Lord Tilbury had uttered a sharp, sneering snort. And when, as happened a little farther on in the scene, Monty had called his former employer a fat, double-crossing wart-hog, the latter had terminated the interview by walking away with his hands under his coat-tails.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not fond of pigs

He had only himself to blame - that was what made it all the more bitter. If he had not so casually given his casting vote in favour of shifting this infernal pig to new quarters, he would not now have been faced by a problem which every moment seemed to become more difficult of situation.

 For Pilbeam was afraid of pigs. He seemed to remember having read somewhere that if you go into a pig's sty and the pig doesn't now you it comes for you like a tiger and chews you to ribbons. Greedy though he was for Lord Tilbury's gold, something told him that never, no matter how glittering this reward, would he be able to bring himself to go into that sty in quest of the manuscript, guarded as it now was by this ravening beast. The Prodigal Son might have mixed with these animals on a clubby basis, but Percy Pilbeam knew himself to be incapable of imitating him.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Champagne for a snake

 Beach withdrew to execute the commission. His demeanour, as he passed from the hall, was downcast. There in a nutshell, he was feeling, you had the tragedy of a butler's life. His not to reason why; his not to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving; his but to go and bring bottles of champagne to marcelled-haired snakes to whom he would greatly have deserved to supply straight cyanide.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)