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During all this time the man slept very little, only occasionally dozing. Donne describes an athletic laborer of twenty-five who received a wound from a rifle-ball penetrating the cranial parietes immediately in the posterior superior angle of the parietal bone, and a few lines from the lambdoid suture. The ball did not make egress, but passed posteriorly downward.
I thought if I could bring down another of them I might stop the progress of the rest. With no little difficulty I got my rifle-ball rammed down. I turned suddenly and rather surprised my pursuers by lifting my weapon to my shoulder and letting fly at the leading red-skin.
On making inquiries at several of the tents, they were treated in a very cavalier sort of manner. No one, of course, knew anything about their horses and packs, and one big bony American even threatened to put a rifle-ball into them unless they left his shanty.
It is only lately that there disappeared in this country the last of many woodsmen, who, though standing many paces away and without the aid of the improved sights of modern guns, could by means of a rifle-ball, with marvelous precision, drive a nail "home" that had been placed partly in a board.
Sometimes these creatures are savage, and will attack man. At length, however, it began to move off in an opposite direction to where we were posted. "A rifle-ball would do little to stop that fellow," said my uncle; "but we may possibly yet capture him, and I should like to obtain his skeleton, though I may not add him to my menagerie." "But we have come to search for water," I suggested.
He moodily curses the Gringo, and wishes that the rifle-ball which wounded him at San Gabriel had reached the core of his proud old heart. From all sides come fugitives with news of the Americanization of the towns. The inland communities are reorganized. His only friend is the Padre, to whose patient ear he confides the story of the hopeless campaign.
The former seems to be determined by dividing the weight of ammunition a soldier may carry in his cartridge-box by the number of charges he is required to have, and then the gun is made as light as will stand the test of firing, blunders all the way through; for we never want a rifle-ball to range much farther than it is possible to hit a single man with it; and a missile of the proper shape from a barrel of sixty gauge will kill a man at a mile's distance, if it strike a vital part.
Of a sudden, three hundred yards out, seemingly from the surface of the river itself, he caught a tiny rising puff of smoke, heard simultaneously a sound he knew so well, the dull spattering impact of a bullet, realized that the pony beneath him was sinking, felt the shock as his own body came to earth, and heard just over his head the singing passage of a rifle-ball.
No answer for a moment, and the question is gently repeated. "Shot through the body rifle-ball. There was a surgeon here last night, but he's gone." "Lie still then until I get one. I would bring Doctor Thorn, but he has too much to do with too much to do just now." He comes near saying "with our own men," but checks himself in time.
The involuntary motion of his ears, though he did not venture to look up, showed that he was aware of their approach. Like lightning, as they were leaping through the gap, Reynard was upon them, and catching one, killed her immediately. He was decamping with his booty, when a rifle-ball put an end to his career.
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