What is "straggling"

Usage examples of "straggling".

In its struggles to see in through the open door, the crowd formed itself into a straggling wedge, with the more adventurous apex nearest the inn.

More had scattered to the winds when ordered units of dragoons had ridden in and poured two deadly pistol volleys against the straggling, vulnerable flanks, then regrouped and reloaded out of arquebus range.

I felt sure Chad had guessed the nature of the surprise we planned for him, but he affected to be astonished when we joined the straggling line of people making their way into the theatre.

Taboga, Captain Sharp went cruising to an island some miles distant to pick up some straggling drunkards who belonged to his ship.

The infantry escort is disposed along the line with every precaution that can be suggested, but the danger of an attack upon the long straggling string of doolies and animals in difficult and broken ground is a very real and terrible one.

Failing to make an irrigated farm in Pecos pay, Asa Williamson packed the family belongings into a covered wagon in 1915 and, with the livestock straggling along behind, headed for the Llano Estacado, in eastern New Mexico.

Stark could make out straggling bands of Farers still on them, heading for Irnan.

But his beard was an untidy straggling thing and he was a short, heavy-set man wearing a tight yellow jerkin and loose-fitting trousers that flared at the cuffs, Folkish clothes, and his face, framed by his long unkempt grayish hair, was a pure Folkish face, coarse-featured, heavy-jawed, bulbous-nosed.

The warehouses were on the left, with the Molt hovels straggling against the Mirror beyond.

They wrapped in the felts designed for storms until, from a distance, they might well have seemed to be a straggling column of mummies, bandages peeling, staggering and lurching from their inquiet sleep.

From the edge of the rich, flowery fields on which I trod to the midway sides of the snowy Olympus, the ground could only here and there show an abrupt crag, or a high straggling ridge that up-shouldered itself from out of the wilderness of myrtles, and of the thousand bright-leaved shrubs that twined their arms together in lovesome tangles.

Near the foot of the falls, where the water broadened into a pool among the rocks, the tall trees grew in a straggling circle round an inner group of four, marking the quarters of the moon, where the effigies of the Divine Child, Hyacinthos, nurseling of Artemis, were hung at the time of the full moon.

A procession of ordinands in red robes, their freshly shaven heads gleaming with oil, wound in a long straggling line behind men banging tambours.

As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station.

But Romulus with his army met them ravaging the country in straggling parties, and by a slight engagement convinces them, that resentment without strength is of no avail.