Word: roped
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Engineer Mencken begins with Arthur Gooch, hanged in 1936 for violation of the Lindbergh kidnapping law, and works back along the rope to the Haymarket anarchists; to Charles Julius Guiteau, who shot President Garfield; to the Molly Maguires, the Irish miners who terrorized the Pennsylvania coal fields; to John Wilkes Booth's accomplices, including Mary Surratt, first woman ever hanged in the U.S. He also includes British body-snatcher William Burke, who added a wrinkle to the illicit business of selling bodies for medical dissection by creating his own corpses, and added a verb to the English language...
...could a 63-year-old slither down a makeshift rope from a cliff-walled Nazi fortress? How could a politically important prisoner escape from such a feudal bastion, guarded every hour by men alert to his potential value? Why would such an escaped prisoner walk into the arms of stooges working in handcuff harmony with his erstwhile captors...
Special knives and tommy-guns and knuckle-dusters ; they wear rope-soled shoes . . . they carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with," Alastair Trumpington breathlessly tells his pregnant wife. "D'you mind very much if I accept?" "No, darling, I couldn't keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn't. I see that." It is not quite easy to believe in the Basil of the epilogue who says, "There's only one serious occupation for a chap now, that...
...other urgent signals. Be familiar with all light and buoyage signals. He able to handle either power or sail boats and know how to make landings through surf. Understand the compass and how to lay out a course. Be able to make all necessary knots and splices with either rope or wire. Be able to overhaul and handle anchor chain and know the regulations for such overhaul and for mooring ships. Be able to steer a ship and to know the effects of rudder and currents on steering. Understand salvage operations and the basic principles of damage control...
Daring Old Man on Fleeing Trapeze. One night the General is supposed to have let himself down on the rope. It was too short. He (a 63-year-old) climbed up again, wove some more, later let himself down again all 60 feet to the moat. Posing as a Swiss traveling salesman, he spent eleven days on obscure roads and railroads leading to Switzerland, Occupied France and Vichy. His closest call came when the Gestapo searched a train on which he was talking with a German officer. He got the German into such a hot argument that the Gestapo...