“I will explain to you, and you will discover by experience, young father. That ball is iron, and inside it is loaded with powder. In one place there is an opening rather small, in which is a fuse of paper or sometimes of wood.”
“Jesus of Nazareth! is there a fuse in it?”
“There is; and in the fuse some tow steeped in sulphur, which catches fire when the gun is discharged. Then the ball should fall with the fuse toward the ground, so as to drive it into the middle; then the fire reaches the powder and the ball bursts. But many balls do not fall on the fuse; that does not matter, however, for when the fire burns to the end, the explosion comes.”
On a sudden Kmita stretched out his hand and cried, “See, see! you have an experiment.”
“Jesus! Mary! Joseph!” cried the young brother, at sight of the coming bomb.
The bomb fell on the square that moment, and snarling and rushing along began to bound on the pavement, dragging behind a small blue smoke, turned once more, and rolling to the foot of the wall on which they were sitting, fell into a pile of wet sand, which it scattered high to the battlement, and losing its power altogether, remained without motion.
Luckily it had fallen with the fuse up; but the sulphur was not quenched, for the smoke rose at once.
“To the ground! on your faces!” frightened voices began to shout. “To the ground, to the ground!”
But Kmita at the same moment sprang to the pile of sand, with a lightning movement of his hand caught the fuse, plucked it, pulled it out, and raising his hand with the burning sulphur cried,—
“Rise up! It is just as if you had pulled the teeth out of a dog! It could not kill a fly now.”