Ben laughed at us scornfully and went on drilling.
All the while Adriana stood weeping, and the other girls were shedding tears in sympathy.

Rufus's distressed cries came to our ears, entreating us to help him and saying something that we could not understand about his leg.
As Addison stood racking his brain for some quicker way of moving the rock he remembered a contrivance, called a "giant purchase," that he had heard of lumbermen's using to break jams of logs on the Androscoggin River.

He had never seen one and had only the vaguest idea how it worked.

All he knew was that it consisted of an immense lever, forty feet long, laid on a log support and hauled laterally to and fro by horses.

He knew that you could thus get a titanic application of power, for if the long arm of the lever were forty feet long and the short arm four feet, the strength of three horses pulling on the long arm would be increased tenfold--that is, the power of thirty horses would be applied against the object to be moved.
Addison explained his plan to the rest of us.