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The letter-lock was a warden who kept its own secret and could not be bribed; the mysterious word was an ingenious realization of the "Open sesame!" in the Arabian Nights. But even this was as nothing. A man might discover the password; but unless he knew the lock's final secret, the ultima ratio of this gold-guarding dragon of mechanical science, it discharged a blunderbuss at his head.
But the scoundrel had guessed what I would do, and had made his preparations for me. It was in the corner of the yard that I found him, a blunderbuss in his hands and a mastiff held upon a leash by his son. The two stable-hands, with pitchforks, stood upon either side, and the wife held a great lantern behind him, so as to guide his aim.
However, John Wilton, you have been a, good servant generally, and I suppose it is not your fault if you have not the courage of a mouse, therefore I shall withdraw my notice for you to leave. I shall make arrangements for the gardener to sleep in the house in future, and you will hand that blunderbuss over to him.
But John Fry, of course, had his blunderbuss, loaded with tin-tacks and marbles, and more likely to kill the man who discharged it than any other person: but we knew that John had it only for show, and to describe its qualities.
"Well," said Mr Turnbull, "this is a spree I little looked for; to have a blunderbuss full of shot sent after me." "No," replied I, laughing, "that's carrying the joke rather too far on the river Thames." "Well, but what a pretty mess we are in: here we have property belonging to God knows whom; and what are we to do with it?"
"I will now tell you a strange adventure I had when I was a young man; but remember I do not put a blunderbuss to any man's breast to compel him to believe me. For what is, is; and let him that disbelieves shake his head till he shakes it off, and it falls to the ground like a cocoanut from the tree.
The view back was a very different thing from the view forward. As he stood there, on the brink of the yawning gulf, March could see right through into the cavern he had just left, and could observe everything that took place there. Mary hastily loaded herself with a rifle and the blunderbuss, also with powder-horn, bullet-pouch, and a bag containing buffalo tongues.
He was a source of constant and justifiable alarm to his friends, who usually compelled him either to ride in front, with the blunderbuss pointing forward, or in the rear, with its muzzle pointing backward. "There go your friends at last, Jerry," said Van Dyk, curling his black moustache, with a smile, as the party emerged from a woody defile into a wide valley.
"This confounded blunderbuss must weigh a ton, I think," Loubet went on. "This is fine music to march by!" And alluding to the sum he received as substitute: "I don't care what people say, but fifteen hundred 'balls' for a job like this is downright robbery. Just think of the pipes he'll smoke, sitting by his warm fire, the stingy old miser in whose place I'm going to get my brains knocked out!"
It's felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff cannot do that. In fact, a bed-room in a quiet house, seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances, to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss.
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