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A regiment of soldiers come up from the South were quartered in the Chateau, and the natives of Boulogne could not have mustered more than a score of disused blunderbusses between them. Then they remembered tales which Andre Lemoine had told, the fate of Lyons, razed to the ground, of Toulon burnt to ashes, and they did not dare rebel.
A large open landau contained the stout Baroness and her niece; a couple of men-servants mounting on the box before them with pistols and blunderbusses ready in event of a meeting with highwaymen.
But though, in similar cases, I had seen such effects produced upon some of the crew; yet, in the present instance, I knew better than that; it was solely brought about by his consorting with with those villainous, irritable, ill-tempered cannon; more especially from his being subject to the orders of those deformed blunderbusses, Priming and Cylinder.
I was thankful to find, in the course of a few minutes, twenty stout, hardy-looking fellows, chiefly Creoles and mulattoes, pretty well-armed either with guns, blunderbusses, pistols, swords, or spears. All had one or two weapons, which they knew how to use; and were thoroughly imbued with a true hatred of the Gothos, as they called the Spaniards, and all those who sided with them.
Instantly the room was full six feet up the wall of a tangle and mass of weapons, swords, spears, arrows, tomahawks, fowling pieces, blunderbusses, pistols, revolvers, scimitars, kreeses every kind of weapon you can think of and the four children wedged in among all these weapons of death hardly dared to breathe.
"What did your excellency say?" inquired the other. "I said, my good fellow, that I would do more single-handed by the means of gold than you and all your troop could effect with stilettos, pistols, carbines, and blunderbusses included. Leave me, then, to act, and have no fears for the result."
We entered with this crowd of persons into an ante-room, the walls of which were covered with the chains and fetters suspended in readiness for the criminals. A block and hammer were placed in the centre of it, on which chains were riveted. The room was guarded with blunderbusses mounted on movable carriages.
And if they cannot manage to get actually robbed, positively put down with their noses in the mud, whilst their carpet bags are rummaged, and their Chub-locks smashed by gloomy ruffians with triple-charged blunderbusses, and knives like scythe-blades, they at least get up a narrow escape.
The craftiest and most daring among them are the greatest men, and call themselves, according to their several degrees of superiority, names of high office, such as those of our native officers of cavalry. Their weapons generally consist of a long spear, a sabre, a shield, and a matchlock; but many of them have pistols also, and some few I have seen with huge blunderbusses.
His detachment numbered only ten but they were well armed with short swords and blunderbusses and wore mail and steel helmets. On the face of it, they would have been a match for ten times this number of merchants. It was hardly noon but the sergeant had obviously already been at his wine flask. He leered at them. "And where do you think you go?"
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