"Crowbar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... high at the shoulder, measures three feet across the chest, 12 inches between the ears and 18 inches from ear to nose, and his weight is estimated by the best judges at from 1200 to 1600 pounds. He never has been weighed. In disposition he is independent and militant. He will fight anything from a crowbar to a powder magazine, and permit no man to handle him while he can move a muscle. And yet when he and I were acquainted—I have not seen him since he was taken to Golden Gate Park—he was not unreasonably quarrelsome, but preserved an attitude of armed neutrality. He would accept ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... bambolear vr. to totter. banco bank. banda band. bandera banner. bandido highwayman. bando faction, party, proclamation. bandolero bandit, highwayman. baqueta ramrod. baratura cheapness. barba chin, beard. barbaro barbarous. barco boat. barra crowbar. barranco ravine; barranquillo (dim.). barreno hole made with a borer or pick. barriga abdomen, belly; barrigon (aug.) barrilla alkali. barro clay, mud. barrunto conjecture. base f. base. Basilio Basil. bastante enough. bastar to suffice. batalla battle. batallon ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... billets is William's job, getting rid of them is the Babe's affair. William, like myself, has far too great a mastery of the patois to handle delicate situations with success. For instance, when the fanner approaches me with tidings that my troopers have burnt two ploughshares and a crowbar and my troop horses have masticated a brick wall I engage him in palaver, with the result that we eventually part, I under the impression that the incident is closed, and he under the impression ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... that day, I saw that Miss Amelia looked exactly like her. You would have needed a pick-ax or a crowbar to flake off even a tiny speck of her. When I had waited for my head to be cracked, until I had time to remember that a Crusader didn't dodge and hide, I looked up, and there she stood with the ruler lifted; but now she had turned just the shade of the wattles on ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... the Troll—for it was a Troll as clear as day—asked if the old dame would stay and keep house for him a few days; and as the day went on he took a great iron crowbar, and asked the lad if he had a mind to go with him up the hill and quarry a few corner-stones. With all his heart, he said, and went with him; and so, after they had split a few stones, the Troll wanted him to go down below and look ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... laugh. Queerer things have happened. Sellers knows everybody from Missouri, and from the West, too, for that matter. He'd introduce you to Washington life quick enough. It doesn't need a crowbar to break your way into society there as it does in Philadelphia. It's democratic, Washington is. Money or beauty will open any door. If I were a handsome woman, I shouldn't want any better place than the capital to pick up ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... mouth which constantly betrays the lucky man of business. His abundant long hair was iron-gray and wiry—Erasmus Walker had seldom time to waste in getting it cut—his eyes were small and shrewd; his hand was firm, and gripped the pen in its grasp like a ponderous crowbar. His writing, Tyrrel could see, was thick, black, and decisive. Altogether the kind of man on whose brow it was written in legible characters that it's dogged as does it. The delicately organized ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... now for so many generations that not one in ten thousand really recognizes what the laws of his being are, except in ways so gross that it seems as if we had sunken to the necessity of being guided by a crowbar, instead of steadily following the delicate instinct which is ours by right, and so voluntarily accepting the guidance of the Power who made us, which is the only possible ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... The captain knew already what had happened on the Lyons road three days earlier, and, certain that Roland was not killed, was expecting him. To his great astonishment, Roland asked him for only one, or rather for two things: the key of the church of Brou and a crowbar. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... and another kept watch in the church during the night, one of the chapels having shortly before been broken open and a sacrilege committed. At the dead of night, finding the time hang heavy on their hands, they took a crowbar and removed the slab and looked down into the abyss below; it was dark as the grave; whereupon they affixed a weight to the end of a long rope and lowered it down. At a very great depth it seemed to strike against something dull and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... bunk house with some thirty others of his shift. At half-past five in the evening the cook at the boarding-house sounded a prolonged alarm upon a crowbar bent in the form of a triangle, that hung upon the porch of the boarding-house. McTeague rose and dressed, and with his shift had supper. Their lunch-pails were distributed to them. Then he made his way to the tunnel mouth, climbed into a car in the waiting ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... other about amidships of the log, Neewa flattened tight, his sharp claws dug in like hooks, and his little brown eyes half starting from his head. It would have taken a crowbar to wrench him from the log. But with Miki it was an open question from the beginning whether he would weather the storm. He had no claws that he could dig into the wood, and it was impossible for him to use his clumsy legs ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... but withal very honest sort of fellow; he was, nevertheless, in heart and soul, a housebreaker of the first order. One night, Jemmy quitted his respectable abode, and, furnished with dark lantern, pistol, crowbar, and crape, joined half-a-dozen neophyte burglars—his pupils and his victims. The hostelry chosen for attack was "The Spaniards." The host and his servants were, however, on the alert; and, after a smart struggle in the passage, the housebreakers were worsted; two or three of them being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... never voted for anybody in my life, and never mean to do so!) I am essentially a painter and a leaf dissector; and my powers of thought are all purely mathematical, seizing ultimate principles only—never accidents; a line is always, to me, length without breadth; it is not a cable or a crowbar; and though I can almost infallibly reason out the final law of anything, if within reach of my industry, I neither care for, nor can trace, the minor exigencies of its daily appliance. So, in every way, I like a quiet ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... hair of some sort. How will you be able to sleep to-night with a hair on your conscience? For your own sake, lift that crowbar. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the boiler and fill her up again with water. After taking the dogs off and securing the cover from falling into the boiler, the stoker gave the cover a tap with the end of the spanner to loosen the joint, but the cover showed no signs of slackening, and the end of a crowbar was requisitioned but without result; and in this case, as in a former one, my opinion was solicited as well as help. I used the crowbar end harder every blow; when at last the cover seemed to spring downwards and upwards, I dropped the bar instantly, thinking the devil ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor
... a pick or a crowbar we could get these stones out in no time," grunted Tom, as he pulled ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... They became enthusiastic over dry-farming, and their resentment toward the Happy family increased as their enthusiasm waxed strong. The Happy Family complained to one another that you couldn't pry a nester loose from his claim with a crowbar. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... cases he discovered, and forced them open with the crowbar, which Maxwell had dropped when he was struck insensible, but they contained nothing worth the labour of having them hoisted up. At last he was about to leave, after a careful search of more than an hour, when ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... behind the trees while Tom touched them off. This time there were three sharp explosions, a shower of fragments rattled through the branches above our heads, and on going to inspect the result we found that the rock had been so shattered that it was an easy matter to pry out the pieces with pick and crowbar—a task of which Joe ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... charms as well as for their usual purposes. But does that prove that whoever acquires fish is ipso facto a magician? On those lines it might be urged that whoever acquires a sloop is a pirate, whoever acquires a crowbar a burglar, whoever acquires a sword an assassin. You will say that there is nothing in the world, however harmless, that may not be put to some bad use, nothing so cheerful that it may not be given a gloomy meaning. And yet we do not on that account put ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... mother's son of them, to be made deacons, squires, and general court members, and such other drill officers as may be requisite in the march of mind, might be seen delving in grim earnest, breaking the frozen earth, uprooting swamp-maples and hemlocks, and waking, with sledge and crowbar, unwonted echoes in a solitude which had heretofore only answered to the woodman's axe or the scream of the wild fowl. The snows of December put an end to their labors; but the yawning excavation still remains, a silent but somewhat expressive ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... attempt at escape. All was to be in readiness for the first gale that should blow from either west or south. Leontine had provided him with a couple of large files and a small crowbar about two feet long, which she had purchased in the village with money supplied by Paul; these she had introduced to his room by secreting them beneath ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... hers, and then, with a sudden cry, dropped the rope and crowbar he was carrying, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... and saw, at the bottom of the scooped-out hole, a crevice in the flat wall of rock which we had been following down the passage, after its turn from the right angle way to creep along the mountainside. Out of this crevice protruded a large iron crowbar, apparently jammed into place, the first tool we ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... split and separate like firewood. He made use sometimes of the hilt of his sword as an additional help: introducing it between ribs that were too rebellious, making it take the part of a lever or crowbar, to separate husband from wife, uncle from nephew, and brother from brother. And all this was done so naturally, and with such gracious smiles, that people must have had ribs of bronze not to cry thank you when the wrist made its play, or hearts of diamond not to be enchanted when such ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... perhaps to 135 deg., but this is too warm; in this case I would fork over the surface of the bed a few inches deep to let the heat escape, and after a couple of days compact the bed again. Boring holes all over the surface of the beds with a crowbar is the common way of reducing a too high temperature, and when the heat has subsided sufficiently fill up these holes with finely pulverized dry loam. With loam we can fill them up perfectly, but we ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... kitchen table. The cook in a swift survey notes the absence of penguin meat. "That'll take two hours to dig out!" is the storeman's rejoinder, and to make good his word, proceeds to pull off blouse and helmet. By careful inquiry in the outer Hut he finds an ice-axe, crowbar and hurricane lantern. The next move is to the outer veranda, where a few loose boards are soon removed, and the storeman, with a lithe twist, is out ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,—what a brutal act of ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the cupboard was now laid bare. This, it appeared, had been plastered more recently than the bulk of the outhouse. Manston loosened the plaster with some kind of tool, flinging the pieces into a basket as they fell. Having now stripped clear about two feet area of wall, he inserted a crowbar between the joints of the bricks beneath, softly wriggling it until several were loosened. There was now disclosed the mouth of an old oven, which was apparently contrived in the thickness of the wall, and having fallen into disuse, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... stood in the road, with the last jag of rails still on it. Jedwort piled on his stakes, and threw on the crowbar and axe, while we ...
— The Man Who Stole A Meeting-House - 1878, From "Coupon Bonds" • J. T. Trowbridge
... angry, but I was determined I would not stay in that mock-cot any longer. I could not bear the sight of anything I looked at. I thought the quickest way of settling the matter was to get rid of the whole business at once, and I told Isaac to put a crowbar under the kitchen stove, which was full of burning wood, and turn it over. But he was horrified, and said he might be arrested and put in prison for doing that; and, besides, it would be such a shame to waste so many beautiful things. Fanny and her mother ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... a look at you, young man,' said Albert's uncle, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. It is a rather shaky bed, the bar that keeps it steady underneath got broken when we were playing burglars last winter. It was our crowbar. He began to feel Noel's ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... shriek flying thin and high like a javelin of horror. A crowd sprung full grown out of the bog of the morning. White, peering faces showing up in the brilliant paths of the acetylene lamps. A uniform pushing through. A crowbar and the hard breathing of men straining to lift. A sob in the dark. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... were picked up. The smaller boys and girls made little heaps of the small stones, while the larger rocks, requiring strength to move, were left to the older boys and girls. To some rocks the boys were obliged to take the pickaxe and crowbar. These were rolled, dragged and carted to the gutter at ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... cried Lennox, more excited than ever. "Sergeant, give some one else that lantern; take a man with you up there by the gun, and bring back a crowbar or two, and one of ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... began to act upon this view: they began to evict, to exterminate, to consolidate; and in this fearful work the awful Famine of '47 became a powerful, and I fear in many cases even a welcome, auxiliary to the Crowbar Brigade.[56] ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... creature. There, with almost hopeless labor we have dug deep wells. Without a guide we have crossed the wilderness, we have ventured into trackless prairies, where water was not found for several marches. With crowbar and pickax in hand we have worked our way over mountains, which seemed to defy aught but the wild goat, and hewed a passage through a chasm of rock, more narrow than ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... reign during the daytime at Jackman's Gulch, for the majority of the inhabitants were out with crowbar and pick among the quartz ledges, or washing clay and sand in their cradles by the banks of the little stream. As the sun sank down, however, the claims were gradually deserted, and their unkempt ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have no merit as builders of dwelling-houses. What is their home, in point of fact? An underground passage, with a cell at the end of it; a gallery, an excavation, a shapeless cave. It is miner's work, navvy's work: vigorous sometimes, artistic never. They use the pick-axe for loosening, the crowbar for shifting, the rake for extracting the materials, but never the trowel for laying. Now in the Eumenes we see real masons, who build their houses bit by bit with stone and mortar and run them up in the open, either on the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... gone, Inger steals out, looks round, and listens. No, no sound from the quarry. She goes nearer, and hears the children playing with little stones. Isak is sitting down, holding the crowbar between his knees, and resting on it like ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... men shut one of his eyes and squinted along the wall that was done to see if the stone was just in the right place; and the other man moved the stone with his crowbar just a little until it was ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... were nearly to the station where we expected to meet the last train, we stopped to take up a rail. We had no instruments for doing this, except a crowbar, and, instead of pulling out the spikes, as we could have done with the pinch burrs used for that purpose by railroad men, we had to batter them out. This was slow work. We had loosened this rail at one end, and eight of us took ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... was set to work with young Jack Pollock stringing barbed wire fence. He had never done this before. The spools of wire weighed on him heavily. A crowbar thrust through the core made them a sort of axle with which to carry it. Thus they walked forward, revolving the heavy spool with the greatest care while the strand of wire unwound behind them. Every once in a while a coil would kink, or buckle back, or strike as swiftly and as viciously ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the plain we saw a pack-horse reel — Too blind to see there was no shade, and too done-up to feel. And charcoaled on the canvas bag ('twas written pretty clear) We read the message Marshall wrote. It said: 'I'm taken queer — I'm somewhere off of Deadman's Track, half-blind and nearly dead; Find Crowbar, get him sobered up, and ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... done. Instead of returning to drink with Gregory and his comrades, Ivan went to prepare a sledge, filled it with straw, and hid at the bottom an iron crowbar. He brought this to the outside gate, and assuring himself he was not being spied upon, he raised the body of the dead man in his arms, hid it under the straw, and sat down above it. He had the gate of the hotel opened, followed Niewski Street as far as the Zunamenie Church, passed through the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... we no foes, Juan, such virtues might cause us exceeding trouble. By St. Jago, I have founded a mighty monarchy! observe how it should be maintained—by science, Juan, by science! and science is as far removed from brute force as this sword from a crowbar. Thou seemest bewildered and amazed, my son: thou hast heard that I seek to conquer Granada by dissensions among the Moors; when Granada is conquered, remember that the nobles themselves are at Granada. Ave Maria! blessed be the Holy Mother, under whose eyes are the hearts of kings!" Ferdinand crossed ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stakes are dispensed with. In the garden, wires, fastened to posts, are occasionally stretched along the rows, and the canes tied to these. The method in this section, however, is to insert stakes firmly in the hill, by means of a pointed crowbar, and the canes are tied to them as early in spring as possible. Unless watched, the boys who do the tying persist in leaving the upper cords of the canes loose. These unsupported ends, when weighted with ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... he pointed it out to us, it was plainly visible. One of the detectives picked up a crowbar and others, still with the hastily selected implements they had seized to fight the fire, started ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... three boys. Nearly everybody went armed, and the party carried with them a small electric searchlight, run by a "pocket" battery, and two oil lanterns. They also took with them some provisions, and a pick, a shovel and a crowbar, for Bahama Bill said there might be some digging to do to ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... appeared to be a man of sixty or thereabouts. A crowbar and shovel which he carried over his shoulder seemed a part of his rough laborer's costume. He had a shrewd, good sort of face, and a Yankee ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... seized a crowbar, traced in the slush the huge outlines of the buried beast, then, measuring with practiced eye the irregular zone of cleavage, she marked out a vast oval, dug holes along it with her bar, dropped into ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... the chief actor in the scene? Five years of life in a workhouse had left no trace of the handsome, long-haired, and passionate woman who had cursed the destroyer of her house and her children with wild vehemence, and had resisted the assault of the Crowbar Brigade with murderous energy. She was now simply a feeble old woman, with scanty grey hair; the light had died out of her eyes; and there was nothing left in them now but weariness and pain; her cheeks were sunk and were dreadfully discolored; in ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... know once for all, which—priest or gallant—was the dupe of a delusion, and I was resolved to sacrifice one of my two lives for the good of the other—yea, if it were necessary, to sacrifice both, for such an existence as I was leading could not last.... Father Serapion procured a mattock, a crowbar, and a lantern, and at midnight we set out for the cemetery, whose plan and arrangements he knew well. After directing the rays of the dark lantern on the inscriptions of several graves, we came at last to a stone half buried under tall grass, and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of sixteen horses drawing a timber-cart composed of one long thick pole between two enormous wheels some seven or eight feet in diameter. Above these wheels a very strong iron arch is fastened, provided with heavy chains, by means of which and with the aid of an iron crowbar, used as a lever, almost any weight of timber can be raised from the ground. The apparatus is called a 'jinka.' The men engaged in the work sit upon the pole with the greatest sangfroid as it goes bumping ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... more time was lost. Down to Plymouth went the engineer and his staff again. They searched for a quarry to dig the stone from, and found it at Oreston, in the north-east corner of the Sound. In March, 1812, crowbar and gunpowder began to be busy there. Meanwhile, on the water of the Sound, two and a half miles south of Plymouth Town, a number of buoys were moored in two parallel lines, extending over a distance of one thousand two hundred yards, east and west. They marked ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... wanted, as indicated in the scrap of paper taken from Braden's purse, showed him that he would have to raise one of those small squares—possibly two or three of them. And so he had furnished himself with a short crowbar of tempered steel, specially purchased at the iron-monger's, and with a small bull's-eye lantern. Had he been arrested and searched as he made his way towards the cathedral precincts he might reasonably have been suspected of a design to break into the treasury ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... contain all sorts of useful things: they presently returned to the shaft with two coils of stout rope, a crowbar, a lantern attached to a length of strong cord, and a great sledge-hammer, with which the tinker drove the crowbar firmly into the ground some ten or twelve feet from the edge of the gap. He made one end of the first rope fast to this; the other end he securely knotted about his waist; one end ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... to you; but I fancy nothing short of a crowbar would make Dick wince. His soul seems to have been fired before we came across him. He"s ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... difficulty. Indeed, it took them three days of hard, continual work. It will be remembered that the floor of the cave was cemented over, and first of all this cement, which proved to be of excellent quality, being largely composed of powdered granite, must be broken up. By the help of a steel crowbar, which they had brought with them in the waggon, at length that part of their task was completed, revealing the rock beneath. By this time Benita was confident that, whatever might lie below, it was not the treasure, since it was evident that the poor, dying Portuguese would not have had ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... to the snake's chamber, where adders and serpents lodge; but open the fast-closed door by means of the well-known spring-root, which you must on no account forget to take with you, or all your trouble will be for naught, for no crowbar or mortal tools will help you. If you want to procure the root ask a wood-seller; it is a common thing for hunters to need, and it is not hard to find. If the door bursts open suddenly with great ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... to get away. Since the quarrying of the rock had commenced, my work had been overseeing the native help, of which we had some fifteen cutting and hauling. In numerous places within a mile of headquarters, a soft porous rock cropped out. By using a crowbar with a tempered chisel point, the Mexicans easily channeled the rock into blocks, eighteen by thirty inches, splitting each stone a foot in thickness, so that when hauled to the place of use, each piece was ready to lay ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... broom, axe, crowbar, kerosene lantern, short rubber hose for siphoning, coil of half-inch rope at least 25 feet long, coil of wire, hammer, pliers, screwdriver, wrench, nails ...
— In Time Of Emergency - A Citizen's Handbook On Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters (1968) • Department of Defense
... down that way. It wasn't far from the end of the wall that was close to the lake. I set down and waited. It seemed to me like someone was trying to break a hole through the wall. I could hear it plunk, plunk, like someone was using a chisel or crowbar, soft and easy, like he didn't want to be heard. I waited to see what ...
— The Man Next Door • Emerson Hough
... gent prized the shutters open with a little crowbar; he then, with a glazier's diamond, soon cut out a small pane, inserted a cunning hand ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the echo of their steps was dead, Charron, old Jerry, and another man jumped down from a loop-hole into the vault they had left, piled up a hoarding at the entrance, and with a crowbar swung back a heavy oak hatch in the footings of the outer wall. A volume of water poured in from the moat, or rather from the stream which had once supplied it. Seeing this, they disappeared with a soft and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... silence in which a dropped pin would have made a noise like a crowbar. Half the audience had turned their heads in the direction of Doctor Proctor's smiling gaze, but all eyes were fixed on his lips. The breathless silence lengthened. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... uncertainly, my own candle blinding me. Water trickled from the roof and walls of this rock-bound passage seven feet high and four feet wide. A stream of it flowed by the tiny tram track. The hollow sound of the mallet on the crowbar forcing its way into the stubborn wall grew louder as we approached, until we stood with the miners in a foot or so of water which showed yellow and shining in the flickering light of four candles. Then we went back to the smithy to wait the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... he awoke, again thinking of it. Every possible hand that could swing a pick or jam a crowbar against grudging ice would be needed up there. Every pair of shoulders willing to assume the burdens of a horrible existence that others might live would be welcomed. A mad desire began to come over him; a strange, impelling scheme took hold of his brain. They would need men,—men who ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... clothing for a considerable body of troops if necessary, while the magazines could produce anything from a needle to a crowbar, or from a handkerchief to a boat's sail. It will be seen hereafter that these careful arrangements assured the success of the expedition, as the troops, when left without pay, could procure all they required from the apparently ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... in the light of Henry Wilson's career, be discouraged. Rittenhouse conquered his poverty; John Milton overcame his blindness; Robert Hall overleaped his sickness; and plane and hammer, and adze and pickax, and crowbar and yardstick, and shoe-last have routed many an army of opposition and oppression. Let every disheartened man look at two pictures—Henry Wilson teaching fifteen hours a day at five dollars a week to get his education, and Henry Wilson under the admiring ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... I was not deceived. By means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks, and having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while with little trouble I relaid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... one side of the building, in a few moments a wonderful scene began. I had seen some rapid work at short intervals during the worst agony of the siege, but never have I seen men who could handle the axe and the crowbar like these rude infantrymen. Everything went down under their blows—brickwork, woodwork, stonework, iron stanchions, everything; and with a rapidity which seemed incredible, gaping spaces appeared. Soon, standing outside, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... account of the coolie,' Lee Fu went on with exasperating deliberation. 'This is what he saw: Our friend Captain Wilbur descended into the lower hold and forward to the forepeak, where there was little cargo. There he worked with great effort for several hours. He had equipped himself with a short crowbar, and carried a light tackle wrapped beneath his coat. The tackle he loosened and hung to a hook above the middle of the port; it was merely for the purpose of lowering the iron crossbars so that they would make no ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
