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Their ammunition is long since spent, their muskets, spoilt by the perpetual vapor-bath of the steaming woods, are left behind as useless in a cave by some cataract of the Orinoco: but their swords are bright and terrible as ever; and they carry bows of a strength which no Indian arm can bend, and arrows pointed with the remnants of their armor; many of them, too, are armed with the pocuna or blowgun of the Indians more deadly, because more silent, than the firearms which they have left behind them.
We were told how ships were lost by the carelessness of their crews; reminded we were on the North-West Coast, where a vessel with a few boxes of beads and bales of blankets, to say nothing of her gunpowder, firearms, and metals, was as valuable, as a vessel laden with gold dust would be in one of our own ports.
With ample firearms and enough brandy half a dozen Russians could control a thousand Aleuts. Swaggering and bullying and loud-voiced and pot-valiant, Drusenin and two Cossacks stooped to enter a low-thatched Aleut hut. The entrance step pitched down into a sort of pit; and as Drusenin stumbled in face foremost a cudgel clubbed down on his skull.
They were no longer in the semblance of white men. Their faces were so blackened with smoke, dirt and burned gunpowder that they might have passed for negroes. "You needn't laugh, Ned," said Obed. "You're just as black as we are. This thing of changing your boarding house every night by violence and the use of firearms doesn't lead to neatness.
Silence!" was heard on all sides. When the agitation was calmed down Barbicane resumed, in a graver tone, his interrupted speech. "You know," said he, "what progress the science of ballistics has made during the last few years, and to what degree of perfection firearms would have been brought if the war had gone on.
He saw that they were armed with guns and tomahawks, not bows and arrows, and he took confidence from this circumstance, knowing that the Indian is a poor marksman with firearms when mounted, and that none could do him harm with the tomahawk unless within arm's reach of him. Had his saddle been secure, he would have had little anxiety, but it was slipping farther and farther back.
Supported by three regiments of cavalry, the vanquished brigades, forming anew, faced the enemy, and prest vigorously into the broken ranks of the Swedes. A murderous conflict ensued. The nearness of the enemy left no room for firearms, the fury of the attack no time for loading; man was matched to man, the useless musket exchanged for the sword and pike, and science gave way to desperation.
Considerable damage had happened to the property of pastoralists in those districts by fire. In one or two places firearms were used. When Nelson asked for the formal leave to introduce the bill, Mr. Glassey, who was leader of the Labour Party, bitterly opposed the request.
I had learned quickness with firearms years ago, but I knew that two swift arrows would cut my life-line before the sound of my ready revolver could break the stillness of the camp. Three pairs of snaky black eyes looked steadily at me, and I stared back as directly into them. Two arrow-points gently touched my ears. Behind me, a tomahawk softly marked a ring around my scalp outside of my hat.
I hunted all the new rope in the house, and they took the firearms away from the robbers, and drove 'em off to jail, and the robbers turned out to be three of the most desp'rate characters in the State, and they're in prison now for a long term of years." "What did you do the rest of the night?" inquired Grandma Padgett.
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