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His mind wandered, and now he was examining Wade's rifle. "Old Henry forty-four," he said. "Dad has one. Also an old needle-gun. Say, can I go hunting with you?" "Glad to have you. How do you handle a rifle?" "I used to shoot pretty well before I went to Denver," he replied. "Haven't tried since I've been home.... Suppose you let me take a shot at that post?"
Without doubt, there was always an abundance of good sound food. Further, the men were well-armed. All military authorities are agreed, I believe, that the Chassepot rifle invented in or about 1866 was superior to the Dreyse needle-gun, which was in use in the Prussian army.
It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker's, where Tartarin was engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the needle-gun, then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew open, and in rushed a bewildered cap-popper, howling "A lion, a lion!" General was the alarm, stupor, uproar and tumult.
Both parties were confident of success, Austria as the larger State, with proud traditions, triumphant over rebellious Italy; and Prussia, with its enlarged military organization and the new breech-loading needle-gun. Count von Moltke at this time came prominently on the European stage as the greatest strategist since Napoleon. He was chief of staff to the king, who was commander-in-chief.
I saw at the same time the offensive weapons that man has made, from a club, such as was grasped by that same savage when he crawled from his den in the ground and hunted a snake for his dinner; from that club to the boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flintlock, to the caplock, to the needle-gun, up to a cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball weighing two thousand pounds through eighteen inches of solid steel.
He has frankly owned that if the decisive battle should have resulted in a Prussian defeat, he had resolved not to survive the shipwreck of his hopes and schemes. And there was a period in the course of the colossal struggle of Koeniggraetz, when to many men it seemed that the wielders of the needle-gun were having the worst of the battle.
Its losses were very great, for the French with their long-range Chassepôt rifles could afford to keep out of range of the needle-gun; the artillery especially suffered severely. One of the batteries had already lost forty-five gunners when it was attacked by French sharpshooters. There was no infantry at hand to retaliate, and two guns were lost.
It is needless here to detail the battles which immediately followed; suffice it to say, the Prussians were victorious in all at Podoll, where the needle-gun did such terrible work; Munchengratz, which gave them the whole line of the Iser; Trautenan, Gitschen, and others. On the 1st of July, the king of Prussia arrived from Berlin and took the supreme command of the army.
'Surely. And Dick departed, to take counsel with himself in the rapidly gathering London fog. Half an hour after he had left, the Nilghai laboured up the staircase. He was the chiefest, as he was the youngest, of the war correspondents, and his experiences dated from the birth of the needle-gun.
There's the very place I'm going to myself. We'll carry up the needle-gun; it's the nicest thing to play with. Come, let's hurry up stairs the back way, little sister, for they'll be out from dinner, and see us." Dotty needed no second hint. In half an hour she was so far recovered from the megrims as to be hungry; when Prudy secretly begged some pudding for her of the willing Angeline.
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