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Our war was fought with the muzzle-loading rifle. The only change that breech-loading arms will probably make in the art and practice of war will be to increase the amount of ammunition to be expended, and necessarily to be carried along; to still further "thin out" the lines of attack, and to reduce battles to short, quick, decisive conflicts.
Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down, too, and burned them slowly and stooped over the smoldering mass and inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment.
At last his face brightened. He had reached a decision. For years he had coveted a new muzzle-loading gun, and he felt that the time had now arrived to get it. So he picked out one valued at forty skins and paid for it. Then, taking back the quills his grandson held, he bought twenty skins' worth of powder, caps, shot, and bullets.
And this last fact was sufficient to make the boy's aim certain, his principal care being to waste no powder and to bring down his game with as little loss of time as might be. The next moment the heavy muzzle-loading gun roared and the buckshot sped on its mission.
I stuck to it for a good many years that an old muzzle-loading rifle was the best shooting tool that ever was or ever could be made, but an old she-bear with one of my bullets through her lungs taught me different by clawing all the clothes and half the meat off my back. I'm learning' slowly, and I ain't too old to learn some more. If I live long enough I'll know consid'able yit.
Another thing that surprised me was the fact that so much had been accomplished in so short a time, for I could not believe that I had been gone from Anoroc for a sufficient period to permit of building a fleet of fifty feluccas and mining iron ore for the cannon and balls, to say nothing of manufacturing these guns and the crude muzzle-loading rifles with which every Mezop was armed, as well as the gunpowder and ammunition they had in such ample quantities.
If, as was generally supposed, the precision of modern arms, with rifles and machine guns sending their bullets three thousand yards and curtains of fire delivered from hidden guns anywhere from two to fifteen miles away, was all in favor of the defensive, then how, when in the days of muzzle-loading rifles and smooth-bore guns frontal attacks had failed, could one possibly succeed in 1916?
Slings, bases, sakers, port-pieces, and fowlers belonged to this class. III. Perriers, from 6 to 8 caliber, firing stone-balls, shells, fire-balls, etc. IV. Mortars, of 1.5 caliber, including petards and murderers. The "great ordnance," or cannon, were muzzle-loading.
"I suppose that had a good deal to do with it, and that, too, may have had much to do with sustaining you and Dinah in your loneliness." The captain raised his eyes and looked at two old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles, suspended on a couple of deer's antlers over the fireplace, and smiling through his shaggy whiskers, said: "You found them handy in those days, Edna?"
The man trained behind the muzzle-loading rifle in all the wars America has fought has been individually a fighter and "a shot," formerly but little skilled in military training, who while obeying orders fought along lines of personal initiative. In the earlier wars of the nation this soldier was known as a "rifleman."
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