Word: chugs
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...gave chase up along Belle Isle under a peppery rain of bullets. Its windshield was splintered to bits, its bow bored in with leaking holes, its engine damaged. A final volley came from the rumrunner as it slipped away to hiding in the Canadian marsh. No. 1401 had to chug back to its dock for repairs...
...first to die. Then a doctor was slain in his office. A railroad detective was riddled in the freight yards. A bullet smashed past a girl at a drugstore counter. The "phantom" also went shooting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River. His weapon made only a muffled chug in the night as his lead whizzed after pedestrians and into people's homes...
Such onomatopoetic creations should be judged by their success rather than by the dictionaries. In this particular case credit is due to a typesetter who set "chuff" for "chug." An able proofreader, quick to sense the merit of the "new word," let it stand...
...Manhattan baby was the U. S. automobile industry, swaddled for its first show. The 31 cars exhibited came so far from filling the spacious Garden that an oval track was erected on the floor, around which the "horseless carriages" chug-chugged through their nursery paces to the mixed distrust and astonishment of gaping throngs. Up on the roof a demonstration "hill" was constructed, and here many an adventurous blood with money to spend had the ride that sold him his first motor...
With every chug the yacht drew nearer to the squat boulder from whose eminence New England society finds itself able to look down. And when the helmsman at last ran to earth Captain Adolphus' pin, the President and Mrs. Coolidge disembarked " amid many direct descendants of the original Pilgrims,"; who were swelled by unabashed plebeians into "an enthusiastic crowd...