His chest heaved in a gasp-like breath and the hands which he sought to keep hanging, slowly closed and clenched as muscles tauten under an electric shock.
"The Tempering"
Charles Neville Buck
Then they saw her muscles tauten throughout her whole young body, saw her draw herself up to her full height, and again for a second's space she stood still.
"The Maid of the Whispering Hills"
Vingie E. Roe
The span was connected with a trigger in the head of each barrel, so set and arranged that when the torpedo being let go in a tideway under the bows and athwart the hawser had fouled, they would be drifted alongside, and so drifted would tauten the span and set off the fuse, which was driven precisely as a ten second shot fuse, only it was calculated to burn fifty-four seconds, because it could not be known exactly in which part of the sweep alongside the strain would be sufficient to set off the trigger.
"A brief sketch of the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury during the war, 1861-1865"
Richard L. Maury