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Updated: May 21, 2025
Harvey measured out a small handful of the coarse, black grains, poured them down the barrel, stuffed in some newspaper and rammed it home with a hickory stick. Then he stuffed in a handful of grass and some more newspaper, hammering on the ram-rod with a brick, regardless of any danger of premature explosion. The coarse powder was not "lively," however, and had always stood such handling.
The first was a splendid war-horse, dead, but lying face forward, half over the federal breastworks. It was the horse of General Adams. The other was a Union soldier the last silent sentinel of Schofield's army. He stood behind a small locust tree, just in front of the Carter House gate. He had drawn his iron ram-rod which rested under his right arm pit, supporting that side.
The flour was kneaded into dough on an oil cloth spread upon the ground, the dough pulled into thin cakes, pinned to boards or barrel heads by little twigs or wooden pegs, placed before the fire, and baked into very fair bread. Who would think of baking bread on a ram-rod? But it was often done.
A piece of string connected the lower part of this with the trigger. To the upper end a long piece of cord was fastened, which was carried through one of the empty ram-rod tubes, and then tied to a lump of flesh, fastened round the muzzle of the gun.
The process was continued until the cannon was stuffed to the muzzle. Then a few grains were dropped over the touch-hole, a long strip of paper laid over this, weighted down with a small pebble, and was ready for lighting. "There," said Harvey, relinquishing the ram-rod to the youth, "that'll speak. If you fill 'em full of powder they don't make half the noise."
The son went to college in the States, then to Germany for a couple of years. He came back here a year ago, terribly German and terribly military, heel clicking, ram-rod back, and all that sort of thing. Musical, too, awfully clever; rather think he has political ambitions. We'll not go in to-day. Some day, perhaps. Indeed, we must be neighbourly in this country.
I know what I think of Marigold. I think him the ugliest devil that God ever created and further marred after creating him. He is a long, bony creature like a knobbly ram-rod, and his face is about the colour and shape of a damp, mildewed walnut.
But he had remained in this condition but a short time, and had barely thrust the ram-rod down the barrel of his piece, to be sure the charge was in her, and to examine her priming, and to shut down the pan slowly, so that it should not snap, and thus make a noise, when his keen Indian eye, for such he had, caught a glimpse of a monstrous panther, leading warily two panther kittens toward her intended supper.
He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab, embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet, yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his long, brass-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at his side.
Meanwhile, preserving an erect, inflexible, and ram-rod carriage, and slightly touching his chapeau, the Captain made his ceremonious way to the cabin, disappearing behind the scenes, like the pasteboard ghost in Hamlet. But these ceremonies are nothing to those in homage of the Commodore's arrival, even should he depart and arrive twenty times a day.
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