Word: mule
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...built the state's first power & light company (which ran only at night "except for one day a week for ironing"), became president of its second largest one in 1927. Now he had a hand in more than 42 different enterprises, ranging from the Jack and Mule Breeders Association to river & harbor improvements. But his greatest concern for the past 25 years has been that "every bolt, every nut, every spool of wire had to come from...
...noon today, Cambridge will be as quite as Dean Duhig's waiting room-and the mass exodus will be completed. The stagecoaches, mule teams, kiddie cars, atomic bombs, and shiny new Studebakers will have disappeared, and five thousand overworked undergraduates will be on their spring vacations...
...riders failed. The second pass was even less successful. The goose had pulled its neck up as far as it could. The honking, the frantic beating of its wings made the mules skittish. Two riders missed completely. But the third was not to be foiled by a goose, rules or no rules. He trotted up to the gibbet, stopped, worked his mule under the goose, and grabbed. His pull nearly lifted him off the mule's back...
There was nothing easy about his route. He and his drivers fought off both Indians and rustlers. Sometimes floods held up the mule drove for months. Sometimes mules went lame crossing the rocky outcroppings in northeastern Bolivia. When that happened, the troop would halt while the animals were roped, thrown, and treated to hoof repairs. In the autumn of 1946, they were still in Trinidad, Bolivia, 400 miles from their goal...
...getting the mules through had become an obsession with Daveron. Despite swollen rivers and poor grazing (the bush seemed to grow only spiked trees, barbedwire plant and fishhook vines), Daveron pushed on. Sometimes wild pigs stampeded the troop and then jaguars clawed the strays. Last month, tired, tattered, and torn, Daveron and his mules made the Amazon. Of the original 171, only one mule had been lost-by snakebite. Some of the 170 that pulled through Daveron sold to the territorial government; others (at $250 a head) went to rubber producers...