Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/87

Rh cannon when it was undergoing a test of its strength. The gun was placed near the wall of an old unoccupied log cabin and our place of safety was around the corner of the house, so that the corner would protect us if the gun should burst. So a train of powder had to be laid from the touch-hole long enough to reach a little distance past the corner, so that we could reach it with a fire-coal on the end of a long pole from our place at the end of the house. A train of powder therefore five or six feet long had to be burned every time the weapon was discharged. The gun being safe, the next thing in order was to find its range. We tried it at the side of a barn a hundred yards away, but there was no evidence that the projectile hit the barn, though we tried several tests at that distance both with buckshot and the long bullet; in fact we could not tell where the bullets went. Continuing our advance upon the target, firing occasionally as we approached, we hit the barn several times with a round shot at a distance of forty yards; we never could find where a bullet struck hut we could hear it rattle. The chickens might have suffered at short range, but we never could get one to stand still long enough to get the cannon unlimbered and sighted.

Finally a circular powder stain about two inches big was made on a foot broad board and put up for a target at a distance of twenty steps. We fired many shots at this target of both kinds of bullets, but only succeeded in piercing the board with three or four round shot. The long bullets never hit the board and we concluded that as soon as a long bullet left the gun, it began to turn end over end and both velocity and direction were lost in richocheting; and as luck would have it, this theory was verified by a mere accident. We had put a maximum charge in the gun, using a long bullet, and tamped the wad down on it very hard. Just then there happened to he an Indian coming up the path from the spring and when he was about twenty yards to one side of the target and about the same distance from the battery, the gun was very carefully sighted and discharged. The report had just reached the edge of the woods sixty yards away, but the echo had not had time to return, when the Indian came running toward us and crying out in a frightened tone of voice, "Mika tika pu nika pe kotta?" "Do you want to shoot me? for what?" We pointed