The heavy beam lay in the middle of the enclosure, and groans were heard from the poor wretches who had received its first shock, and who had been almost cut in twain, on the angle of the stone steps.
They stared at the beam, they stared at the church.
"Beard and belly!" said Clopin, "here be men afraid of a beam."
"Captain, 'tis not the beam which bothers us, 'tis the door, which is all covered with iron bars.
At last they came into a maze of dust, where a quantity of people were tumbling over one another, and where there was such a confusion of unaccountable shapes of
beams, bulkheads, brick walls, ropes, and rollers, and such a mixing of gaslight and daylight, that they seemed to have got on the wrong side of the pattern of the universe.
To this it clung in a seeming frenzy, grimacing ghastly, surging and plunging from side to side in its efforts to disengage its property from the beam, but uttering no sound.
The ball had evidently been fired from the opposite side of the room, for in one of the oaken beams overhead was a shallow blue dint, where it had struck a knot and been deflected downward to the breast of its victim.
Captain Purnall presses a switch and our signal beam begins to swing through the night, twizzling spokes of light across infinity.
I've turned in a General Call, so even if they don't see our beam some one's bound to help--or else we must.
We shut off our beam as she adjusts herself--steering to a hair--over the tramp's conning-tower.
"Keep our beam on her and send out a General Warning," says Captain Purnall, following her down.
The captain in his armchair, holding on grimly at the head of the table, with the soup-tureen rolling on one side of the cabin and the steward sprawling on the other, would observe, looking at me: "That's your one-third above the
beams. The only thing that surprises me is that the sticks have stuck to her all this time."
