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Rivers has a gunsmith over at Kingsville, one Elmer Umholtz, who does all his fraudulent conversions for him. I have an example of Umholtz's craftsmanship, myself. The collector who bought this spurious flintlock spotted what had been done, and squawked to the Rifle Association, and to the postal authorities."
The loading was from the muzzle, a process so slow that one of the favorite tactics of the time was to await the fire of the enemy and then charge quickly and bayonet him before he could reload. The old method of firing off the musket by means of slow matches kept alight during action was now obsolete; the latest device was the flintlock.
The former seem chiefly to make coffins and highly painted and decorated clothes-boxes. The latter are mostly gun-makers, and bore the barrels of guns by hand out of solid bars of iron. At this tedious operation they may be seen every day, and they manage to finish off a gun with a flintlock very handsomely.
The blooming prairie, the log cabin nestling near the border-line of grove or forest, the old water-mill, the cross-roads store, the flintlock rifle, the mould-board plough, the dinner-horn, with notes sweeter than lute or harp ever knew, are once more in visible presence. At such an hour little stretch of the imagination is needed to recall from the shadows forms long since vanished.
A pair of flintlock pistols, glinting silver, lay upon the desk; quill pens stood in a silver cup full of shot; a cramped map, drawn and colored by hand and yellow with age, hung above the mantel and purported, in bold printing with flourishes, to be The Proposed Route for the Erie Canal. Portraits of General Greene and Thomas Jefferson, by Stuart, also hung upon the walls.
About ten o'clock my impromptu friend and his companion order their horses, and buckle their arms and accoutrements about them to depart; my "brother" stands before me and loads up his flintlock rifle; it is a fearful and wonderful process; it takes him at least two minutes; he does not seem to know on which particular part of his wonderful paraphernalia to find the slugs, the powder, or the patching, and he finishes by tearing a piece of rag off a by-standing villager to place over the powder in the pan.
Even on parade he was as stiff as his long-barrelled flintlock, looking as if England could hope for no quarter at his hands; yet he permitted no admiring glances from bright eyes to escape him.
In the red sash which passed around his waist were thrust a hunting knife and tomahawk, while one hand clasped a cumbersome rifle, which, like all firearms of those times, was used with ramrod and flintlock. Omas would have had a rather pleasing face had he let it alone; but his people love bright colors, and he was never seen without a lot of paint daubed over it.
Dickle formed them in line and marched them up beside the big automobile truck that stood in the middle of the road. Here each lad was given a flintlock rifle and sent over to the mouth of the cave, where Ethan Allen and a half-dozen Green Mountain Boys were waiting, seated about a camp fire.
"We don't have a really bad case here, now. A few of these people were lash-burned horribly, though." Vall was looking at the other sketches. One was a musket, with a wide butt and a band-fastened stock; the lock-mechanism, vaguely flintlock, had been dotted in tentatively.
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