Word: trolleyers
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...dozens of great fires broke out and Chinese and Japanese shells not aimed at the Settlement screamed over it. there were gruesome accidents. The Chinese motorman of a Shanghai trolley car, seeing that a big bomb was going to land in the street ahead of it, applied his brakes and yelled warnings to his 14 passengers, clanged his bell. An instant later the bomb exploded 20 feet in front of the trolley, blew it to blazes, killing the motorman, all his passengers and some people standing in the street, while other pedestrians who miraculously escaped found their clothes soaked...
...agile at 50 he can kick a football. Light-haired, bespectacled, he is president of Youngstown (Pa.) Artificial Limb Co., which turns out 150 limbs a year. To succeed him the delegates last week chose 50-year-old Clyde Aunger, who at 16 lost a leg in a trolley car accident. In business for himself in San Francisco since 1911, he was taken to Australia during the War to teach his trade. President Aunger's pride is a music box in the calf...
Some of the characters who people these sequences include a sardonic anthropologist named Dr. Thumb, who involves himself joyfully on Trolley's side; Newshawk Kilgallon, Trolley's satirical, hard-drinking crony, a World War hero and onetime child prodigy singer who has been trying to commit suicide since adolescence; Gus Popolos, a Rasputin-like fanatic who wanders around in a moth-eaten bear rug, proclaims Colonel Steele the new Messiah, finally marries an outsmarted chorus girl; Moussa, a notorious Arab pickpocket, whom nobody understands except Captain Trolley; the mayor's katzenjammer son, whose snooping in Dr. Thumb...
Captain James Job Trolley is a tall, leathery pioneer eccentric, complete with cape and beaver hat, whose "monstrous antics" and windy wit have made him for half a century the liveliest landmark in Denver (called Goldtown). Nominally he is the mining editor of the Rocky Mountain Herald, at a life salary of $15 a week; in practice his daily pieces automatically go in the managing editor's wastebasket. His real mission in life is to fight the 20th Century. Tourists, those "fleas on the world's back." who always go for him with cameras, he always goes...
Story opens with Captain Trolley delivering a typical blast against the Colonel's latest philanthropy, consisting of 46 cathedral chimes. "There are thieves, he trumpets, "mark you well, who are trying to exchange their loot for the moldy perfume of sanctity. They are hypocrites and gold-plated scoundrels of the first water, damme!" To spoil the chimes-presentation ceremony, the Captain distributes handbills announcing a counterceremony at which he will dedicate his own tomb to the death of the West. The philanthropist strikes back by demanding Trolley's arrest. From this beginning Author Fowler more than makes good...