"No, my boy, that won't do. Why, the people here would lose all faith in me if I was afraid to take my own big medicine. No; we'll set about running up a shed at once, and take care to avoid risks as much as possible. Two men with you and me will be enough to do the mixing, at first, at any rate, and you may choose them out of your own friends."
A wooden shed was soon fixed up on an open space far from trees or bush, and Tom arranged to begin work before dawn next day, so as to get some mixing done before the sun was high. He was not at all sure about the proportions in which the three constituents ought to be mixed, but hoped to find that out by experiment. Just as the darkness began to clear he went out to the shed with Mbutu alone to make a first attempt in private. It was unsuccessful; the mixture burnt readily enough, but without explosion. He guessed from his failure that the quantity of saltpetre in his first mixture had not been sufficient, and, carefully measuring out his quantities in a small brass cup, he increased the amount little by little, testing a portion of the mixture after each addition, until at last he was rewarded with a decided explosion which reverberated in a hundred echoes, and was answered by the banging of the sentry's drum in the village. Tom laughed with almost childish delight at the success of his efforts, and, taking careful note of the proportions he had finally arrived at, he returned to the village.
Next morning he took out the two Bahima selected by Mbutu, and found that not only were they quick to learn, but, what is more important in a native of Africa, they recognized the necessity for caution. They worked steadily till ten o'clock, and at the end of the day Tom found himself in possession of several pounds of serviceable powder. It was a queer-looking mixture, and Tom said to himself, with a laugh, that no doubt it would miserably fail to pass the Waltham test; but he knew that it would serve his purpose, and that was sufficient. Within a fortnight he had stored about half a ton in the recesses of the cavern in the cliff, and had collected in the village a large quantity of the several constituents, which only awaited mixing.
"It is a pity," he thought, "that with an almost unlimited supply of powder, we can make so little use of it. At the most we have muskets for only two hundred and fifty men, and many of these are likely to be as dangerous to us as to the enemy. With the powder we already have we could supply a brigade for a month's campaign. But surely it can be used in some other way?"
In the event of another siege the store of powder would, he knew, be invaluable for mining purposes; but he wished to find some method by which it could be turned to account in field operations. At last he hit upon an idea. Why not lay in a supply of hand-grenades? He could not, of course, with the limited supply of metal in the village, and the still more limited smithy arrangements, manufacture bombs with a metal case; but after some cogitation he found a means of surmounting this difficulty. The grenades, he thought, might be made of thick pottery, encased in a double or triple envelope of elastic wicker-work, the latter intended to prevent the bomb, when thrown, from bursting before the fuse had time to do its work. In the manufacture of this outer envelope Tom relied on the extreme ingenuity of the Bahima in all kinds of basket-weaving; and his expectations in this respect were more than realized. Experimenting first with a dummy shell, he found that, protected by the wicker covering, it could be thrown to a distance of forty or fifty yards without breaking the earthenware container. This was quite sufficient for his purpose.
"I think," he said to the katikiro, who was watching his experiments with mingled wonder and amusement, "that we shall be able to give the Arabs more than one surprise if they visit us again. I want you to get your potters and weavers to make two dozen more jars after this pattern; Mbutu will take them, together with a large basketful of granite chips, to the shed where we made the powder. We shall see to-morrow whether these little jars are going to be of use to us."
On the following morning Tom went with Mbutu to the powder-shed, which had always been made taboo to the villagers. There he half-filled one of the jars with granite chips (all the available iron scraps being required for the muskets), and rammed in on the top a bursting-charge of gunpowder. Into the neck of the jar he fitted a plug, through which a hole was bored for the insertion of a time fuse. In the preparation of the fuse Tom's school-boy experiments in pyrotechny stood him in good stead. Some cotton fibre steeped in a solution of saltpetre fully answered his purpose. His next step was to erect a framework of match-boarding to serve as a target. Stationing himself behind an earthen breastwork about forty yards from the target, he set fire to the fuse of his trial bomb and, hurling it at the target, dropped to the ground behind the entrenchment. There he waited for some seconds until a loud report showed that his grenades could at least be trusted to explode; some small fragments dropped within a few feet of his shelter. Stepping up to the target, he found it pitted in a dozen places with dents due to the granite chips, some of which were driven some distance into the wood. There was no doubt that had a body of men been within a few feet of the bomb when it exploded, not many would have survived.
Tom's next concern was to ensure, first, that the fuse should be perfectly trustworthy, and secondly, that the bursting-charge of powder should not be so great as to bring the grenadiers themselves within the danger-zone. It required two or three days of careful experiment before he was satisfied on these points. Then he instructed the katikiro to select twenty potters and twice as many weavers to manufacture a large supply of bombs; and under his own and Mbutu's supervision these were carefully charged in the shed, and stowed away in the cavern on the cliff. The provision of a number of plug-bayonets by the village smiths completed his experiments in the preparation of warlike stores.
On the day before the general palaver, the katikiro came to Tom and informed him that the chief who had so insolently dismissed Barega's messenger during the siege had come into the village with a retinue, and had very humbly asked to see Kuboko.
"Ah!" said Tom; "he has come round, has he? Bring him up."