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If the gun was a caplock, the cap was to be taken off and a piece of leather put on to exclude moisture and dirt; if a flintlock, the filling was to be taken out and the pan filled with tow or cotton. Their march was not only cautious but orderly. At five A.M. the bugle sounded for rising, two hours being allowed for prayers and breakfast.
In the early days, matchlocks were sneered at as being inferior to crossbows, much in the same way that the first railway engine was contemptuously spoken of and written about by the coaching men at the beginning of this century; but when in 1700 the flintlock musket made its appearance popular prejudice was shaken, and it was completely removed in 1820 when percussion guns came into pretty general use.
Some of the companies were not uniformed at all. So enormous was the press of business upon the authorities, so limited was the power of an almost purely agricultural, non-manufacturing world suddenly to clothe alike these thousands of volunteers, suddenly to arm them with something better than a fowling-piece or a Revolutionary flintlock, that the wonder is, not that they did so badly, but that they did so well.
"It would make a horse laugh a Yankee cavalry horse, anyhow to see this army." Hunt had been over the camp that first afternoon on a personal tour of investigation. They were not a thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles at that time in Johnston's army. Half of the soldiers were armed with shotguns and squirrel rifle and the greater part of the other half with flintlock muskets.
The gun he had told me to use was a single-barrel fowling-piece, an ancient converted flintlock, the stock made of an iron-hard black wood with silver mountings.
So he talked the matter over with the old Squire, who was a year older than Billy, and offered him half the profits if he would accompany him; and the result was that the two boys took the old man's flintlock gun and set off at daylight the following morning.
With his pretensions at being an artist, he worked only when he had to repair a fire-lock, to transform a flintlock into a rifle, or to make one of those silver decorated pistols which were the admiration of the Little Chaplain. The boy hoped that this man would be his sister's choice; that the vèrro, with his astonishing skill, would become a member of his family.
Among those who went from Virginia to Kentucky, in 1781, was a man named Benjamin Craig, who took his whole family with him. Mr. Craig wore a hunting shirt and leggings of buckskin and a fur cap. Like all men in the backwoods, he carried a hatchet and a knife stuck in his belt, and he almost always had his old-fashioned flintlock rifle on his right shoulder.
The new idea that his life was of value for the child's sake sent a half-guilty feeling through him, lest he be caught looking at these implements, where they lay with his old converted flintlock gun on the rack above the still glowing stove. Sh!
The excited children were now told to be very still and keep quiet, using their eyes alone, and witness the contest between man's skill and the birds' cleverness. So accustomed have some old loons become to being fired at and missed by Indians using the old-fashioned flintlock shotgun, which makes such a flash when fired, that they just barely keep out of range.
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