Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/300

 touch-hole, and when well filled and aimed, it has been known to hit a target six good paces off! Its one disadvantage, however, was the frequency, I might say the inevitability, with which it burned your fingers. Yet this did not shatter in the pirates that mystic love of firearms and powder which burns in the pagan breast of every young boy. To describe it, or to account for it, is impossible. Love of woman may come later; love of gold may eventually supplant it. But never can the most golden hair or the most golden hoard re-awaken that first, fierce, primal thrill which comes of beholding the smoke-stained grimness of a secretly acquired old rabbit-gun!

Besides his key gun, which swung from almost every pirate's belt, their arsenal could boast of two bullet-moulds, several feet of lead piping, a Flaubert rifle, out of order, an air-gun, six sling-shots, two hatchets, and three broken garden-rakes, which were to serve as boarding-irons, to say nothing of several bottles filled with gunpowder and rigged with dangerously swift-burning fuses of home manufacture. Most of this gunpowder, I may add, had been illicitly secured by Binney