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Updated: July 16, 2025
Did you ever happen to see black-powder smoke in the moonlight? It puffed out perfectly round, like a big, pale balloon, this did, and for a second something was bounding through it without a sound, you understand something a shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow, it looked to me.
They went back to a low-order steam-power, black-powder, culture, and haven't gotten beyond that to this day. The relatively civilized regions are on the east coast of Asia and the west coast of North America; civilized race more or less Caucasian.
In my dreams back on the farm, my only fear had been lest all the grizzlies be killed before I reached the Rockies; barring such dire calamity, I had never had a doubt of my prowess. But somehow, when at last I found myself alone in the dark forest, it seemed the better part of valor to postpone the actual encounters until I should become more skillful with my old black-powder rifle.
Tack, tap; tack, tap it went on minute by minute, hour by hour. The sun warmed the air to an oven; painted butterflies, azure and crimson, came flitting over the stones; still the devil went on hammering nails into the hills. Down leftward a black-powder gun was popping on the film-cut ridge of Bluebank.
It sounds like a cannon compared with the modern smokeless powder used for almost a generation by nearly all hunters. Perhaps it was merely accident that had caused Larsen before he left the house to load his pump gun with black-powder shells.
Huge black-powder cartridges with large leaden bullets; they would only fit an elephant gun; and yet this was the kind of weapon this doctor found necessary to bring to protect himself against British soldiers. Had that doctor been caught with his rifle he would have deserved to be shot on the spot.
The trip up-river was an even bigger success, the high point coming when Altamont set his controls for Hover, pointed out a snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to fire one of the machine-guns at it. The lead balls of their own black-powder rifles would have plunked into the water-logged wood without visible effect.
That gun opened fire at once, and was supported by "Faith," "Hope," and "Charity," three black-powder guns along Telegraph Hill, besides the two guns on Surprise Hill. In fact, all the Boer guns chimed in round the circle, and for two hours it was difficult to trace where each whizzing shell came from, familiar though we are with their peculiar notes.
Between ourselves, I was terrified at the prospect of having to fire off the heavy four-bore elephant-rifle. The "kick" of fourteen-and-a-half drachms of black-powder is tremendous, and one's shoulder ached for two hours afterwards, though I do not regret the "kick" in surveying the water-buffalo which has hung now in my hall for thirty years.
At the same instant there was an explosion which was worse than the black-powder explosion of the night before, and he was just thinking how unkind it was of Edestone not to have warned him before indulging in another one of his pyrotechnical demonstrations, when it was followed by another and another.
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