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"With smokeless powder in the cartridges, and the silencer on, I can make a shot from my coat-pocket, and you wouldn't even know it had been done.... And I'm some shot, believe me." "Impossible!" Mary ejaculated. "No, it ain't," the man asserted. "Here, wait, I'll show you." "Good gracious, not here!" Mary exclaimed in alarm. "We would have the whole place down on us." Garson chuckled.
"Smokeless powder, no doubt," thought the young Tsar, and looking after the fleeing man saw him take a few hurried steps, and bending lower and lower, fall to the ground and crawl on his hands and knees. At last he remained lying and did not move. The other fugitive, who was ahead of him, turned round and ran back to the man who was lying on the ground.
Passing the rock, he perceived that the hut, which bore every sign, from its smokeless chimney and air of negligence and decay, to have been some time deserted, stood upon a piece of ground, about an acre in extent, which had once been cultivated, but was now luxuriant with a spontaneous crop of weeds and thistles.
Marksmen could sweep the decks of a ship with Mausers at the distance of a mile, and with the smokeless cartridges it would have been mere conjecture where the sharpshooters were located. There are rows of armor-piercing steel projectiles from Germany still standing around rusting in the Spanish batteries, and they never did any more than they are doing.
I shall pass over the guns with the bare mention that I use a 30.30 Winchester, smokeless. For railroad purposes all this outfit for two goes into two trunks and a box one trunk for all the bedding and night things: the other for all the clothing, guns, ammunition, eating things, and incidentals. The box holds the saddles, bridles, and horse things.
If the fulminating cap be large, the powder fine, the wads numerous and hard and the charge of shot heavy, all being well rammed down, and the paper case well spun over the last pasteboard wad, a charge of smokeless powder about equal in weight to one-half of what would be employed of black powder would give about the same results as black powder.
One fine old fellow did his best to persuade us to take black powder rifles, explaining with paternal indulgence that no one yet really knew just what smokeless powder might do, and that there was a good deal to be said in favor of having smoke to conceal us from the enemy.
O Lalala would not give one away, or sell one at any price. Neither would he let a light be taken from his own fire or pipe. The next schooner was not expected for two months, as the last was but a fortnight gone. Le Brunnec had not a match, nor Kriech. The governor had not returned. The only alternatives were to go lightless and smokeless or to assault the heartless oppressor.
Instead of the powerful Lee-Metford rifle, with its smokeless powder, its magazine action, and its absence of recoil, they were armed with the Martini-Henry, which possessed none of these advantages. In place of the deadly Maxim there was the Gardner gun the very gun that jammed at Tamai, and that jammed again at Abu Klea.
"That's remarkably like a bullet, lad," he said reflectively. "And it's a long shot Big Alec's making." "And he's using smokeless powder," he concluded, after an examination of the mile-distant shore. "That's why we can't hear the report." I looked at the shore, but could see no sign of Big Alec, who was undoubtedly hidden in some rocky nook with us at his mercy.
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