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It had been sunk amongst a number of round holes dug by the native miner, and it appeared to us that they had been working the southern butt-end of the eastern reef. He had preferred it to another pit sunk a little distance from the centre by a man named Jones, whose venture yielded the poorest results.
So he looks it over again; fat as a history of the Roman Empire, and hefted it and well, there were young apprentice-boys aboard that didn't weigh any more. But to make sure, he lashes it to the butt-end of a fourteen-pound shell the gunner had once given him for a desk-weight. He hated to lose that desk-weight, a relic of the Santiago fight, but a good cause this a good cause.
I painted the picture in four words: the Constitution thrown into the gutter; the Assembly driven to prison with the butt-end of a musket, the Council of State dispersed; the High Court expelled by a galley-sergeant, a manifest beginning of victory for Louis Bonaparte, Paris ensnared in the army as though in a net; bewilderment everywhere, all authority overthrown; all compacts annulled; two things only remained standing, the coup d'état and ourselves.
Phillips's musket comes down butt-end on the head of the assailant. A spear is thrust in Cook's very face. He fires blank shot. The harmlessness of the shot only emboldens the savages. Women are seen hurrying off to the hills; men don their war mats. There is a rush of the white men to get positions along the water edge free for striking room; of the savages to prevent the whites' escape.
The Parson was breathing deep. "And what then?" "Why, sir, I'd nothin on me ony the dooks me God give me. So I up and I skip it." The Parson leaned out, and smote at the man's shaven skull with the butt-end of his pistol. "Ain't I done right, sir?" squeaked the little man, dodging back. "You've sold us!" cursed the Parson, and he was white even in the moon. "Hush, sir! hush!" cried Kit.
The muskets of the soldiery had been rendered unserviceable by the wet, and Blucher, drawing his sabre from beneath his cloak, dashed forward exclaiming, "Forward!" Several thousand of the French were drowned or fell by the bayonet, or beneath the heavy blows dealt by the Landwehr with the butt-end of their firelocks.
He thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there.
One slaveholder with whom I lived, whipped one of his slaves one day, as many, I should think, as one hundred lashes, and then turned the butt-end and went to beating him over the head and ears, and truly I was amazed that the slave was not killed on the spot. Not a few slaveholders whip their slaves to death, and then say that they died under a "moderate correction."
And the sentinel, in the meantime white as chalk, weeping with pain and fright, would knock at the door with the butt-end of the gun and cry helplessly: "I'll fire! I'll kill you as sure as I live! Do you hear?" But he dared not shoot. If there was no actual rebellion they never fired at those who had been condemned to death. And Tsiganok would gnash his teeth, would curse and spit.
"You kin call yourself Abbie if you choose," he used to say, "and 'tain't none o' my business, but I was in the meetin'-house and heard Zeke let drive, and b'gosh it sounded just like a buzz-saw strikin' the butt-end of a log. 'Abijah! Abijah! he hollered. Shet Parson Simmons up same's a steel trap. Gosh, but it was funny!"
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