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Luckily no one was hit, and we were soon round a point and under cover; also their shooting was as bad as usual. One missile, however, it was a pot-leg, struck a donkey-load and smashed a bottle of good brandy and a tin of preserved butter.
One of the Sam-riek men, right at his elbow, uttered a pitiful cry, clutched frenziedly at his breast, from which the blood was spouting, and dropped to the ground, his chest torn to pieces by five charges of pot-leg, or stout nails, which had struck him at the same moment; while groans and screams from various parts of the enclosure showed that the little force had suffered pretty severely.
Indeed, for close-quarter righting pot-leg is far more comprehensive, and far less likely to miss than the lonely modern bullet. Moroever, his crew had quite as much dread for him as they had for the enemy, and as a consequence they fought with a briskness which made even their grim little chief approve.
"I've seen wounds like this in a man who has been hit with a piece of `pot-leg' or a handful of nails, but never with an ordinary bullet." Drake winked. "That", he remarked, "is a little device of my own.
Of modern rifles Kettle had only twenty on board, but he had an abundance of those beautiful instruments known as "trade guns," and at shot-range a man can be killed just as definitely by a dose of pot-leg out of a gas-pipe barrel as he can by a dum-dum bullet sent through scientific rifling.
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